TUESDAY, OCT. 17. A German this morning, picking a hole in the ground, near our camping-tree, for a tent-pole, struck a piece of gold, weighing about three ounces. As soon as it was known, some forty picks were flying into the earth all around the spot. You would have thought the ground had suddenly caved over some human being, who must be instantly disinhumed or die. But the fellow sought was not the companion of the digger, but the mate of the yellow boy accidentally found by the German. But no such mate was discovered; the one found had slumbered thus alone like Adam before the birth of Eve. How solitary that couch, though in Paradise! Think of that, ye devotees of celibacy, who people your dreams with fairies, and imagine a bliss amid the wrecks of the fall, which was not the portion of man even before that moral catastrophe. But I forget the piece of gold; no fellow was found for it here; but in a ravine, seven miles distant, a little girl this morning picked up what she thought a curious stone, and brought it to her mother, who, on removing the extraneous matter, found it a lump of pure gold, weighing between six and seven pounds. The news of this discovery silenced all the picks here for half an hour, and set as many tongues going in their places. Twenty or thirty started at once to explore the wonders of this new locality. Gold among hunters, like a magnet in the midst of ferruginous bodies, attracts every thing to itself. WEDNESDAY, OCT. 18. We are camped in the centre of the gold mines, in the heart of the richest deposits which have been found, and where there are many hundred at work. I have taken some pains to ascertain the average per man that is got out; it must be less than half an ounce per day. It might be more were there any stability among the diggers; but half their time is consumed in what they call prospecting; that is, looking up new deposits. An idle rumor, or mere surmise, will carry them off in this direction or that, when perhaps they gathered nothing for their weariness and toil. A locality where an ounce a day can be obtained by patient labor is constantly left for another, which rumor has enriched with more generous deposits. They who decry this instability in others, may hold out for a time, but yield at last to the same phrensied fickleness. I have never met with one who had the strength of purpose to resist these roving temptations. He will not swing a pick for an ounce a day, with the rumor of pounds ringing in his ears. He shoulders his implements to chase this phantom of hope.