“The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,” the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst.  “My back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day.”

But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later.  He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day.  “But—­if we strike it rich—­I’ve lost my guess, that’s all.”  Then he adds:  “Couldn’t go on the hill to-day.  It snowed.  It always snows here, I expect”; and the final heart-sick line, “Don’t you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?”

This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work.  One feels the dreary uselessness of the quest.

Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm.  These things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough.  In a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother’s face again, or his sister’s, or get married, or revisit the “Banner State,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words.

In ‘Roughing It’ the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week.”  This statement requires modification.  It was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing “riffles” and “screening tailings.”  The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work.  It is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession.  That he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement.  He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver and chemicals.  I hardly think I shall try the experiment again.  It is a confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money.”

As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour, prospecting for the traditional “Cement Mine,” a lost claim where, in a deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins in a fruitcake.  They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono Lake —­that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in ’Roughing It’ he has so vividly pictured.  It was good to get away from the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment.  They made a walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever visited at all.  Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft.  Amid mountain-peaks and giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while.  More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind.