Even the rough, coarse miner, far from civilizing influences and beyond
the reach of social advantages, recognizes the fact that this Little,
unostentatious animal plodding along through life in its own modest way,
yet wields a wonderful influence over the destinies of man. So the Aladdin
mine was not disturbed that summer.
We paid How Long, and in the following spring had a flattering offer for
the claim if it assayed as well as we said it would, so Buck, our expert,
went out to the Aladdin with an assayer and the purchaser. The assay of
the Aladdin showed up very rich indeed, far above anything that I had ever
hoped for, and so we made a sale. But we never got the money, for when the
assayer got home he casually assayed his apparatus and found that his
whole outfit had been salted prior to the Aladdin assay.
I do not think our expert, Buck, would salt an assayer's kit, but he was
charged with it at this time, and he said he would rather lose his trade
than have trouble over it. He would rather suffer wrong than to do wrong,
he said, and so the Aladdin came back on our hands.
It is not a very good mine if a man wants it as a source of revenue, but
it makes a mighty good well. The water is cold and clear as crystal. If it
stood in Boston, instead of out there in northern Colorado, where you
can't get at it more than three months in the year, it would be worth
$150. The great fault of the Aladdin mine is its poverty as a mine, and
its isolation as a well.
An Operatic Entertainment.
Last week we went up to the Coliseum, at Minneapolis, to hear Theodore
Thomas' orchestra, the Wagner trio and Christine Nilsson. The Coliseum
is a large rink just out of Minneapolis, on the road between that city
and St. Paul. It can seat 4,000 people comfortably, but the management
like to wedge 4,500 people in there on a warm day, and then watch the
perspiration trickle out through the clapboards on the outside. On the
closing afternoon, during the matinee performance, the building was
struck by lightning and a hole knocked out of the Corinthian duplex that
surmounts the oblique portcullis on the off side. The reader will see at
once the location of the bolt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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