The claim he was working was a mile or two up the river, and his company, he told me, was one of the greatest curiosities in the country. It consisted of two Americans, two Frenchmen, two Italians, two Mexicans, and my ragged friend, who was the only man in the company who spoke any language but his mother tongue. He was captain of the company, and interpreter-general for the crowd. I quite believed him when he said it was hard work to keep them all in order, and that when he was away no work could be done at all, and for that reason he was now hurrying back to his claim. But before leaving me he said, “I saw you sketching from the trail, and I came down to ask a favor of you.” There is as much vanity sometimes in rags as in gorgeous apparel; and what he wanted of me was to make a sketch of him, rags and all, just as he was. To study such a splendid figure was exactly what I wanted to do myself, so I made an appointment with him for the next day, and begged of him in the meantime not to think of combing his hair, which, indeed, to judge from its appearance, he had not done for some time. I found afterwards that he was a well-known character, and went by the name of the Flying Dutchman. I passed by his claim one day, and such a scene it was! The Tower of Babel was not a circumstance to it. The whole of the party were up to their waists in water, in the middle of the river, trying to build a wing-dam. The Americans, the Frenchmen, the Italians, and the Mexicans, were all pulling in different directions at an immense unwieldy log, and bestowing on each other most frightful oaths, though happily in unknown tongues; while the directing genius, the Flying Dutchman, was rushing about among them, and gesticulating wildly in his endeavors to pacify them, and to explain what was to be done. He spoke all the modern languages at once, occasionally talking Spanish to a Frenchman, and English to the Italians, then cursing his own stupidity in German, and blowing them all up collectively in a promiscuous jumble of national oaths, when they all came to a stand-still, the Flying Dutchman even seeming to give it up in despair. But after addressing a few explanatory remarks to each nation separately, in their respective languages, he persuaded them to try once more, when they got along well enough for a few minutes, till something went wrong, and then the Tower-of-Babel scene was enacted over again. What induced the Flying Dutchman to form a company of such incongruous materials, and to take so much trouble in trying to work it, I can’t say, unless it was a little of the same innocent vanity which was apparent in his exaggerated style of dress. There was a considerable number of Frenchmen in the neighborhood of Downieville, but they kept very much to themselves. So very few of them, even of the better class, could speak English, and so few American miners knew anything of French, that scarcely ever were they found working together.