We stand in a row, allowing sufficient room between each for swinging the pick. We are undermining the bank, the water running at our feet and between us and the bottom of the bank. Each chunk of red dirt dislodged by the pick falls into the running water, and if it be hard and will not readily dissolve it must be broken up by pick or shovel to keep the stream clear and unimpeded. The large boulders are picked out by hand and thrown behind us--not in disordered fashion, either. Room in the cut is scarce and must be economized, so the ever-accumulating bowlder pile is “faced up” with a neat wall, laid without mortar, but with some care and skill. The bed-rock is under our feet. We are undermining the bank and keeping the stream turned in as much as possible to the part undermined. The gravel for a foot or six inches is pretty hard and the stones here are harder and closer packed than those nearer the surface. There the gravel is lighter. Many of the stones are light and rotten; a blow with the pick dashes them to pieces. This streak just above the ledge and for a few inches in the crevices of the ledge is our “pay streak” where ages on ages ago some stream ran, depositing, as all streams do, the heavier gravel on the bottom and the lighter above. Occasionally the pick strikes a firmly embedded boulder hard and square on its point, in such a way as to send the vibration like a shock along the iron, up the handle and into one’s arm and “crazy-bone.” Our bank of dirt is about eight feet in height. A few inches of the top is a dark mould, below that is three or four feet of “hard-pan,” below the “hard-pan” light sandy gravel and rotten boulders, and near the ledge is the pay streak. This order of formation has varied as we have worked up and into the bank. At first, near the river’s edge, there was only mould on a very light alluvial sand. This was readily washed off and paid four dollars or five dollars per day. A little farther back we struck the edge of the red gravel streak. This for a time paid better. Farther still came the deposit of light sandy gravel, and lastly came in the accursed “hard-pan.”