When I bought this claim, I had to give up my cabin, as the distance was so great, and I now camped with my partners close to our claim, where we had erected a brush house. This is a very comfortable kind of abode in summer, and does not cost an hour’s labor to erect. Four uprights are stuck in the ground, and connected with cross pieces, on which are laid heaps of leafy brushwood, making a roof completely impervious to the rays of the sun. Sometimes three sides are filled in with a basketwork of brush, which gives the edifice a more compact and comfortable appearance. Very frequently a brush shed of this sort was erected over a tent, for the thin material of which tents were usually made offered but poor shelter from the burning sun. When I left my cabin, I handed it over to a young man who had arrived very lately in the country, and had just come up to the mines. On meeting him a few days afterwards, and asking him how he liked his new abode, he told me that the first night of his occupation he had not slept a wink, and had kept candles burning till daylight, being afraid to go to sleep on account of the rats. Rats, indeed! poor fellow! I should think there were a few rats, but the cabin was not worse in that respect than any other in the mines. The rats were most active colonizers. Hardly was a cabin built in the most out-of-the-way part of the mountains, before a large family of rats made themselves at home in it, imparting a humanized and inhabited air to the place. They are not supposed to be indigenous to the country. They are a large black species, which I believe those who are learned in rats call the Hamburg breed. Occasionally a pure white one is seen, but more frequently in the cities than in the mines; they are probably the hoary old patriarchs, and not a distinct species.[2] They are very destructive, and are such notorious thieves, carrying off letters, newspapers, handkerchiefs, and things of that sort, with which to make their nests, that I soon acquired a habit, which is common enough in the mines, of always ramming my stockings tightly into the toes of my boots, putting my neckerchief into my pocket, and otherwise securing all such matters before turning in at night. One took these precautions just as naturally, and as much as a matter of course, as when at sea one fixes things in such manner that they shall not fetch way with the motion of the ship. As in civilized life a man winds up his watch and puts it under his pillow before going to bed; so in the mines, when turning in, one just as instinctively sets to work to circumvent the rats in the manner described, and, taking off his revolver, lays it under his pillow, or at least under the coat or boots, or whatever he rests his head on.