This has rarely if ever been done, even where the deposits were first disturbed by the more fortunate adventurer. If it could not be done in the green tree, what are you to expect in the dry? If when the _placers_ were fresh, many gathered but little more than sufficient to meet their current wants, what can you anticipate when they are measurably exhausted? They who inflame your imagination with tales of inexhaustible deposits which only wait your spade and wash-bowl, abuse your credulity, and dishonor their own claims to truth. THE PROFESSIONS AND PURSUITS. All the secular professions and more privileged or prescribed pursuits in California are crowded to overflowing. Physicians are without patients; lawyers without clients; surveyors without lands; hydrographers without harbors; actors without audiences; painters without pupils; financiers without funds; minters without metals; printers without presses; hunters without hounds, and fiddlers without fools. And all these must take to the plough, the pickaxe, and spade. Even California, with all her treasured hills and streams, fell under that primal malediction which threw its death-shade on the infant world. It is as true here as among the granite rocks of New England—in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Let none think to escape this labor-destiny here; it environs the globe, and binds every nation and tribe in its inexorable folds. The merchant, whose shrewdness avails him everywhere else, will often be wrecked here. The markets of a single month have all the phases of its fickle moon. The slender crescent waxes into the circle; and the full orb passes under a total eclipse. The man that figured on its front is gone, and with him the hopes of the millionaire. The bullfrog in his croaking pond, and the owl in his hooting tree, remain; but the speculator, like a ghost at the glimmer of day, hath fled. You can only dimly remember the phantom’s shape and where he walked, and half doubt the dream in which he denizened and dissolved from sight. But still the gulf of vision swarms with realities—with beings where the play of life and death, joy and grief, wealth and want, are the portion of the living and the legacy of the dead. California is a continent swelling between the hopes of the future and the wrecks of the past; but like all other continents, will be visited with the alternation of day and night. The cloud will travel where the sunbeam hath been. WRONGS OF CALIFORNIA.