At the hotel I stayed at here I found very agreeable company; most of the party were Texans, and were doctors and lawyers by profession, though miners by practice. For the first time since I had been in the mines I here saw whist played, the more favorite games being poker, euchre, and all-fours, or “seven up,” as it is there called. There were also some enthusiastic chess-players among the party, who had manufactured a set of men with their bowie-knives; so what with whist and chess every night, I fancied I had got into a civilized country. The day before I had intended leaving this village, some Mexicans came into the camp with a lot of mules, which they sold so cheap as to excite suspicions that they had not come by them honestly. In the evening it was discovered that they were stolen animals, and several men started in pursuit of the Mexicans; but they had already been gone some hours, and there was little chance of their being overtaken. I waited a day, in hopes of seeing them brought back and hung by process of Lynch law, which would certainly have been their fate had they been caught; but, fortunately for them, they succeeded in making good their escape. The men who had gone in chase returned empty-handed, so I set out again for Moquelumne Hill on my way south. I was put upon a shorter trail than the one by which I had come from there; and though it was very dim and little traveled, I managed to keep it: and passing on my way through a small camp called Clinton, inhabited principally by Chilians and Frenchmen, I struck the Moquelumne River at a point several miles above the bridge where I had crossed it before. The river was still much swollen with the rains and snow of winter, and the mode of crossing was not by any means inviting. Two very small canoes lashed together served as a ferry-boat, in which the passenger hauled himself across the river by means of a rope made fast to a tree on either bank, the force of the current keeping the canoes bow on. When I arrived here, this contrivance happened to be on the opposite side, where I saw a solitary tent which seemed to be inhabited, but I hallooed in vain for some one to make his appearance and act as ferryman. There seemed to be a trail from the tent leading up the river; so, following that direction for about half a mile, I found a party of miners at work on the other side--one of whom, in the obliging spirit universally met with in the mines, immediately left his work and came down to ferry me across.