Our claim, on being first prospected, was reported to pay three cents to the pan from the top down. We believed it at first, not having learned that “three cents to the pan from the top down” means the biggest kind of luck. If you get an average of half a cent a pan from the top down, and the dirt would wash easily, we should make money. It was hard even for an “honest miner” to give as the result of a prospect anything less than “three cents to the pan.” But “hard-pan” is our foe. “Hard-pan” is the essence of brickbats. Its consistency is about that of chalk. It seems the finest kind of sand cemented and pressed together. It can be carved into any form with a knife. It takes as much time to work off a square foot of hard-pan as ten square feet of soft gravel. When, after half a day’s labor, we succeed in getting down a cave, it goes into the ground-sluice in a few great lumps, which must be battered to pieces with our picks before the water will slowly dissolve them into mud. And it doesn’t hold a “color” of gold. The work in the ground-sluice goes on hour after hour. Pick and shovel and scrape, scrape and shovel and pick, the water meantime tumbling and roaring over the bank and making it difficult for us to hear each others’ voices. The sun climbs higher and gets hotter. The water pail is frequently visited. The backs of the gray shirts are wet with perspiration. In an easy, companionable claim, where the partners are all good fellows and on good terms and not too insane in the matter of getting an enormous quantity of dirt through the sluices each day, there may be more or less brief suspensions from the work, when all hands lean on their shovels and talk politics, or horses, or last night’s poker game, or have a short service of tobacco smoke, with the usual solemn preliminaries of cutting the plug and filling pipes. But if the majority of the “company” are a mean, crabbed, close-fisted lot, the misery goes on without cessation.