the few survivors linger languidly in the washed-out gulches or sleepy village like harried bees around the ruins of their hive.  “We have no industry left now,” they told me, “and no men; everybody and everything hereabouts has gone to decay.  We are only bummers—­out of the game, a thin scatterin’ of poor, dilapidated cusses, compared with what we used to be in the grand old gold-days.  We were giants then, and you can look around here and see our tracks.”  But although these lingering pioneers are perhaps more exhausted than the mines, and about as dead as the dead rivers, they are yet a rare and interesting set of men, with much gold mixed with the rough, rocky gravel of their characters; and they manifest a breeding and intelligence little looked for in such surroundings as theirs.  As the heavy, long-continued grinding of the glaciers brought out the features of the Sierra, so the intense experiences of the gold period have brought out the features of these old miners, forming a richness and variety of character little known as yet.  The sketches of Bret Harte, Hayes, and Miller have not exhausted this field by any means.  It is interesting to note the extremes possible in one and the same character:  harshness and gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor.  Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children.  Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage.  I heard a group of brawny pioneers in the street eagerly discussing the quantity of tail required for a boy’s kite; and one graybeard undertook the sport of flying it, volunteering the information that he was a boy, “always was a boy, and d—­n a man who was not a boy inside, however ancient outside!” Mines, morals, politics, the immortality of the soul, etc., were discussed beneath shade-trees and in saloons, the time for each being governed apparently by the temperature.  Contact with Nature, and the habits of observation acquired in gold-seeking, had made them all, to some extent, collectors, and, like wood-rats, they had gathered all kinds of odd specimens into their cabins, and now required me to examine them.  They were themselves the oddest and most interesting specimens.  One of them offered to show me around the old diggings, giving me fair warning before setting out that I might not like him, “because,” said he, “people say I’m eccentric.  I notice everything, and gather beetles and snakes and anything that’s queer; and so some don’t like me, and call me eccentric.  I’m always trying to find out things.  Now, there’s a weed; the Indians eat it for greens.  What do you call those long-bodied flies with big heads?” “Dragon-flies,” I suggested.  “Well, their jaws work sidewise, instead of up and down, and grasshoppers’ jaws work the same way, and therefore I think they are the same species.  I always notice everything like that, and just because I do, they say I’m eccentric,” etc.