It is near eleven o’clock. There stands in a cool corner of the claim and carefully shielded from any stray flying pebble, a black bottle. It is nearly full of whiskey--very common corn whiskey. It is most welcome at this hour. Poison it may be, but a draught from the tin cup brightens up and makes all things new. The sunshine is more cheerful. All Nature smiles. The picks descend with increased force and a host of new day-dreams start into being. It revives hope. It quenches despair. It gilds the monotony of our lives. It was ever thus, and possibly ever shall be, world without end. It is high noon. The sun is over our heads and the shadows are at their shortest length. One of our number trudges wearily up to the reservoir to shut off the water. So soon as its flow lessens we trudge off in wet overalls or heavy rubbers to our respective cabins. We are now ground-sluicing at or about the year 1860, when miners generally had abandoned “cabining” in squads and each man kept house by himself. Cause--general incompatibility of temper, temperament, disposition, and habit. The sober miner found it disagreeable to live permanently with the spreeing miner, and the miner nice in his domestic economy and particular about his food soon became tired of a companion who never aired his blankets and didn’t care whether his bread was light or heavy, sweet or sour. Trudging to our cabins, we pick up the dried twigs in our path. These are to kindle the dinner fire. Dinner is very much like breakfast, beef or bacon, bread, tea, dried-apple sauce. The boots are kicked off and thumped into a corner. The temperature is up to that notch that induces perspiration without any exertion at all and the ugly little stove makes it hotter still. We sit down to the noon meal in a melting condition and rise from it in the same state. Dinner is eaten, the “nooning” is over, back again to the claim, turn on the water, pick, shovel, scrape, pry, toss back boulders and prop up sluices slipped from their supports. Between two and three o’clock a snowy-white cloud rises over a distant peak to the eastward. It seems like a great bank of snow against the blue sky and the longer we look at it the farther we seem to peer into its translucent, clear-white depths. It rises over that peak at almost the same hour every afternoon and is almost of the same shape. It is the condensed vapor of the snow melting on the higher Sierra summits eighty-six miles distant. It is imposing in its silent imperceptible rising, its wonderful whiteness, its majesty, its distance. It seems a fit bed of snowy splendor for fairies or some sort of ethereal beings to bask and revel in. It seems to be looking down half in scorn half in pity at us four weary, miserable worms of the dust, feebly pecking at a bit of mother earth, muddy, wet, and feebly squirming in and about this bank of dirt.