Immense freight-wagons, with ponderous wheels and axles, heavily laboring under prodigious loads of ore for the mills, or groaning with piles of merchandise in boxes, bales, bags, and crates, block the narrow streets. Powerful teams of horses, mules, or oxen, numbering from eight to sixteen animals to each wagon, make frantic efforts to drag these land schooners over the ruts, and up the sudden rises, or through the sinks of this rut-smitten, ever-rising, ever-sinking city. A pitiable sight it is to see them! Smoking hot, reeking with sweat, dripping with liquefied dust, they pull, jerk, groan, fall back, and dash forward, tumble down, kick, plunge, and bite; then buckle to it again, under the galling lash; and so live and so struggle these poor beasts, for their pittance of barley and hay, till they drop down dead. How they would welcome death if they had souls! Yet men have souls, and work hard too for their miserable pittance of food. How many of the countless millions of the earth yearn for death or welcome its coming? Even the teamsters that drive these struggling labor-worn brutes seem so fond of life that they scorn eternity. Brawny, bearded fellows they are; their faces so ingrained with the dust and grit of earth, and tanned to such an uncertain hue by the scorching suns and dry winds of the road, that for the matter of identity they might as well be Hindoos or Belooches. With what malignant zeal they crack their leather-thonged whips, and with what ferocious vigor they rend the air with their imprecations! O Plutus! such swearing--a sliding scale of oaths to which swearing in all other parts of the world is as the murmuring of a gentle brook to the volume and rush and thunder of a cataract. The fertility of resource displayed by these reckless men; their ready command of metaphor; their marvelous genius for strange, startling and graphic combinations of slang and profanity; their grotesque originality of inflexion and climax; their infatuated credulity in the understanding of dumb animals; would in the pursuit of any nobler art elevate them to a niche in the temple of fame. Surely if murder be deemed one of the Fine Arts in Virginia City, swearing ought not to be held in such common repute.