A gambling-room in San Francisco is a tolerably quiet place, where little else is heard but good music or the chinking of dollars, and where, if it were necessary, one could sleep comfortably enough. But a gambling-room in a small camp in the mines is a very different affair. There not so much ceremony is observed, and the company are rather more apt to devote themselves to the social enjoyment of drinking, quarrelling, and kicking up a row generally. In this instance the uproar beat all my previous experience, and sleeping was out of the question. The bar-room, I found, was also the gambling-room of the diggings. Four or five monte tables were in full blast, and the room was crowded with all the rowdies of the place. As the night wore on and the brandy began to tell, they seemed to be having a general fight, and I half expected to see some of them pitched through the canvas into the sleeping apartment; or perhaps pistols might be used, in which case I should have had as good a chance of being shot as any one else. I managed to drop off asleep during a lull in the storm; but when I awoke at daylight, it was only then finally subsiding. I found that some man had broken a monte bank, and, on the strength of his good fortune, had been treating the company to an unlimited supply of brandy all night, which fully accounted for the row; but I did not fancy such sleeping quarters, and made up my mind to camp out while I remained in those diggings. I selected a very pretty spot at the foot of a ravine, in which was a stream of water; and, buying a tin coffee-pot and some tea and sugar, I was completely set up. There was a baker and butcher in the camp, so I had very little trouble in my cooking arrangements, having merely to boil my pot, and then raking down the fire with my foot, lay a steak on the embers. The weather was very hot and dry; but it was getting late in the season, and I generally awoke in the morning like the flowers the Irishman sings about to Molly Bawn, “with their rosy faces wet with dew.” At least as far as the dew is concerned--for a rosy face is a thing not seen in the mines, the usual color of men’s faces being a good standard leathery hue, a very little lighter than that of a penny-piece--all rosiness of cheek, where it ever existed, is driven out by the hot sun and dry atmosphere. I found camping out a very pleasant way of living. With my blankets I made a first-rate awning during the day; and if I could not boast of a bed of roses, I at least had one of dahlias, for numbers of large flowers of that species grew in great profusion all round my camp, and these I was so luxurious as to pluck and strew thickly on the spot where I intended to sleep.