They make up heavy bills of losses against themselves in this way, but still there are plenty of men who prefer devoting themselves to this speculative style of digging, in hopes of eventually striking a rich lead, to working steadily at surface diggings, which would yield them, day by day, sure though moderate pay. But mining of any description is more or less uncertain, and any man “hiring out,” as it is termed, steadily throughout the year, and pocketing his five dollars a day, would find at the end of the year that he had done as well, perhaps, as the average of miners working on their own hook, who spend a considerable portion of their time in prospecting, and frequently, in order to work a claim which may afford them a month’s actual washing, have to spend as long a time in stripping off top-dirt, digging ditches, or performing other necessary labor to get their claim into working order; so that the daily amount of gold which a man may happen to be taking out, is not to be taken in itself as the measure of his prosperity. He may take a large sum out of a claim, but may also have spent as much upon it before he began to wash, and half the days of the year he may get no gold at all. There were plenty of men who, after two years’ hard work, were not a bit better off than when they commenced, having lost in working one claim what they had made in another, and having frittered away their time in prospecting and wandering about the country from one place to another, always imagining that there were better diggings to be found than those they were in at the time. Under any circumstances, when a man can make as much, or perhaps more, by working for himself, he has greater pleasure in doing so than in working for others; and among men engaged in such an exciting pursuit as gold-hunting, constantly stimulated by the success of some one of their neighbors, it was only natural that they should be loath to relinquish their chance of a prize in the lottery, by hiring themselves out for an amount of daily wages which was no more than any one, if he worked steadily, could make for himself. Those who did hire out were of two classes--cold-blooded philosophers, who calculated the chances, and stuck to their theory unmoved by the temptations around them; and men who had not sufficient inventive energy to direct their own labor and render it profitable.