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time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more
burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that
death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw
soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is
the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see.
Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of
weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction.
And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little
patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in
pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted,
obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in.
There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket
hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find
it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one
of the possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put
my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision.
And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner and
know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so I know
the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them
exteriorly.
And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the
inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions
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