The procession paraded the streets for two or three hours, and proceeded to the bull-ring, where the ceremonies were to be performed. The bull-ring here was neither so large nor so well got up as the one at Sonora, but still it could accommodate a very large number of people. As the miners entered the arena with their wheelbarrow and long tom, they were immensely cheered by the crowds who had already taken their seats, the band in the meantime playing “Hail Columbia” most lustily. The Declaration of Independence was read by a gentleman in a white neckcloth, and the oration was then delivered by the “orator of the day,” who was a pale-faced, chubby-cheeked young gentleman, with very white and extensive shirt-collars. He indulged in a great deal of buncombe about the Pilgrim Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, the “Blarney-stone of America,” as the Americans call it. George the Third and his “red-coated minions” were alluded to in not very flattering terms; and after having exhausted the past, the orator, in his enthusiasm, became prophetic of the future. He fancied he saw a distant vision of a great republic in Ireland, England sunk into insignificance, and all the rest of it. The speech was full of American and local phraseology, but the richness of the brogue was only the more perceptible from the vain attempt to disguise it. Many of the Americans sitting near me seemed to think that the orator was piling up the agony a little too high, and signified their disapprobation by shouting “Gaas, gaas!” My next neighbor, an old Yankee, informed me that, in his opinion, “them Pilgrim Fathers were no better than their neighbors; they left England because they could not have everything their own way, and in America were more intolerant of other religions than any one had been of theirs in England. I know all about ’em,” he said, “for I come from right whar they lived.” In the middle of the arena, during the ceremonies, was a cage containing a grizzly bear, who had fought and killed a bull by torchlight the night before. His cage was boarded up, so that he was deprived of the pleasure of seeing what was going on, but he could hear all that was said, and expressed his opinion from time to time by grunting and growling most savagely. After the oration, the company dispersed to answer the loud summons of the numerous dinner-bells and gongs, and in the afternoon there was a bull-fight, which went off with great _éclat_.