In this part of the country the pine trees are of an immense size, and of every variety. The most graceful is what is called the “sugar pine.” It is perfectly straight and cylindrical, with a comparatively smooth bark, and, till about four-fifths of its height from the ground, without a branch or even a twig. The branches then spread straight out from the stem, drooping a good deal at the extremities from the weight of the immense cones which they bear. These are about a foot and a half long, and under each leaf is a seed the size of a cherrystone, which has a taste even sweeter than that of a filbert. The Indians are very fond of them, and make the squaws gather them for winter food. A peculiarity of the pine trees in California is that the bark, from within eight or ten feet of the ground up to where the branches commence, is completely riddled with holes, such as might be made with musket-balls. They are, however, the work of the woodpeckers, who, like the Indians, are largely interested in the acorn crop. They are constantly making these holes, in each of which they stow away an acorn, leaving it as tightly wedged in as though it were driven in with a sledge-hammer. There were several quartz veins in the neighborhood of Nevada, some of which were very rich, and yielded a large amount of gold; but, generally speaking, they were so unscientifically and unprofitably worked that they turned out complete failures. Quartz mining is a scientific operation, of which many of those who undertook to work the veins had no knowledge whatever, nor had they sufficient capital to carry on such a business. The cost of erecting crushing-mills, and of getting the necessary iron castings from San Francisco, was very great. A vast deal of labor had to be gone through in opening the mine before any returns could be received; and, moreover, the method then adopted of crushing the quartz and extracting the gold was so defective that not more than one half of it was saved. There is a variety of diggings here, but the richest are deep diggings in the hills above the town, and are worked by means of shafts, or coyote holes, as they are called. In order to reach the gold-bearing dirt, these shafts have to be sunk to the depth of nearly a hundred feet, which requires the labor of at least two men for a month or six weeks; and when they have got down to the bottom, perhaps they may find nothing to repay them for their perseverance. The miners always calculate their own labor at five dollars a day for every day they work, that being the usual wages for hired labor; and if a man, after working for a month in sinking a hole, finds no paydirt at the bottom of it, he sets himself down as a loser of a hundred and fifty dollars.