There was no lack of public amusements in the town. The same company which I had heard in Nevada were performing in a very comfortable little theater--not a very highly decorated house, but laid out in the orthodox fashion, with boxes, pit, and gallery--and a company of American glee-singers, who had been concertizing with great success in the various mining towns, were giving concerts in a large room devoted to such purposes. Their selection of songs was of a decidedly national character, and a lady, one of their party, had won the hearts of all the miners by singing very sweetly a number of old familiar ballads, which touched the feelings of the expatriated gold-hunters. I was present at their concert one night, when, at the close of the performance, a rough old miner stood up on his seat in the middle of the room, and after a few preliminary coughs, delivered himself of a very elaborate speech, in which, on behalf of the miners of Downieville, he begged to express to the lady their great admiration of her vocal talents, and in token thereof begged her acceptance of a purse containing 500 dollars’ worth of gold specimens. Compliments of this sort, which the Scotch would call “wiselike,” and which the fair cantatrice no doubt valued as highly as showers of the most exquisite bouquets, had been paid to her in most of the towns she had visited in the mines. Some enthusiastic miners had even thrown specimens to her on the stage. Downieville is situated at what is called the Forks of the Yuba River, and the town itself was frequently spoken of as “The Forks” in that part of the country. It may be necessary to explain that, in talking of the forks of a river in California, one is always supposed to be going up the river; the forks are its tributaries. The main rivers received their names, which they still retain, from the Spaniards and Indians; and the first gold-hunting pioneers, in exploring a river, when they came to a tributary, called one branch the north, and the other the south fork. When one of these again received a tributary, it either continued to be the north or south fork, or became the middle fork, as the case might be. If a river was never to have more than two tributaries, this would do very well, but the river above Downieville kept on forking about every half-a-mile, and the branches were all named on the same principle, so that there were half-a-dozen north, middle, and south forks.