Our quarters at Cusheon’s Hotel were vile. A blanket spread on the floor of a loft was our bedroom, but the swarms of lice which infested the place rendered sleep almost impossible, and made us think with regret on the soft turf of the prairie, or a mossy couch in the woods. The fare, limited to beefsteaks, bread, and dried apples, was wretchedly cooked and frightfully expensive. Beef was worth fifty cents or two shillings a pound, flour the same, a “drink” of anything except water was half a dollar, nor could the smallest article, even a box of matches, be bought for less than a “quarter”--one shilling. Before we reached William’s Creek we paid a dollar and a quarter, or five shillings, for a single bottle of stout. Coin of any kind is rarely seen, gold-dust being the circulating medium, and each person carries a small bag of it, from which the requisite quantity is weighed out for each payment. [Illustration: MINERS WASHING FOR GOLD. (_See page 372._) ] In the mines we visited at Cameron Town the “pay-dirt,” as the stratum of clay and gravel above the “bed-rock” in which the gold lies is called, was from thirty to fifty feet below the surface. A shaft is sunk to the required depth, and the “dirt” carried up by a bucket raised by a windlass. This is emptied into a long box, called the dump-box or “long tom,” having a false bottom of parallel bars, with narrow spaces between them, raised a few inches above the true bottom, across which several cross pieces are placed. A stream of water, brought in a series of troughs called “flumes,” sometimes for a considerable distance, pours into the dump-box at one end, and runs out by another series of troughs at the other. As the dirt is emptied in, a man armed with a large many-pronged fork stirs it up continually, and removes the larger stones. The smaller particles and the clay are carried down the stream, while the gold, from its greater weight, falls through the spaces between the parallel bars of the false bottom, and is arrested by the transverse ones or “riffle” of the true one. The “pay-dirt” is generally not more than from three to five feet thick, and the galleries of the mine are consequently very low, the roof being propped up by upright timbers, and cross beams wedged in above. The water is pumped out of the mines by a water wheel and chain pump, but these are quite useless in winter, and become covered with enormous icicles. One or two were still kept working, even at this late season, by help of fires and roofing over. The Cameron, Raby, and Caledonian Claims, three of the richest in William’s Creek, were, by good luck, still in full swing, and we frequently went down with some of the happy proprietors, and crept about the low dripping galleries, washed for gold, or picked out the rich “pockets” formed under some arresting boulder. In many places we could see the glistening yellow,