mining that he would have to let them soften for a month or two before he could recover his magical powers. He was quite a young man, but had been regularly brought up to his profession, having spent several years as confederate to some magician of higher powers in the States--somewhat similar, I presume, to serving an apprenticeship, for when I mentioned the names of several of his professional brethren whose performances I had witnessed, he would say, “Ah, yes, I know him; he was confederate to so-and-so.” As he intended very soon to resume his practice, he was on the look-out for a particularly smart boy to initiate as his confederate; and I imagine he had little difficulty in finding one, for, as a general thing, the rising generation of California are supernaturally smart and precocious. I met here also an old friend in the person of the Scotch gardener who had been my fellow-passenger from New York to Chagres, and who was also one of our party on the Chagres River. He was now farming, having taken up a “ranch” a few miles from Sonora, near a place called Table Mountain, where he had several acres well fenced and cleared, and bearing a good crop of barley and oats, and was busy clearing and preparing more land for cultivation. This Table Mountain is a very curious place, being totally different in appearance and formation from any other mountain in the country. It is a long range, several miles in extent, perfectly level, and in width varying from fifty yards to a quarter of a mile, having somewhat the appearance, when seen from a distance, of a colossal railway embankment. In height it is below the average of the surrounding mountains; the sides are very steep, sometimes almost perpendicular, and are formed, as is also the summit, of masses of a burned-looking conglomerate rock, of which the component stones are occasionally as large as a man’s head. The summit is smooth, and black with these cinder-like stones; but at the season of the year at which I was there, it was a most beautiful sight, being thickly grown over with a pale-blue flower, apparently a lupin, which so completely covered this long level tract of ground as to give it in the distance the appearance of a sheet of water. No one at that time had thought of working this place, but it has since been discovered to be immensely rich. A break in this long narrow Table Mountain was formed by a place called Shaw’s Flats, a wide extent of perfectly flat country, four or five miles across, well wooded with oaks, and plentifully sprinkled over with miner’s tents and shanties.