We left Salt Lake City next day with regret.

It was telegraphed to Reno that we were to arrive there, to be treated,
escorted, and transported to Virginia City free of charge. They began
the treating by giving us an excellent breakfast at the hotel. They
asked us ladies if we wanted to go down the shaft with the gentlemen to
see the famous silver-mine. We cried "Yes" with enthusiasm.

A dressing-room was put at our disposal, and the clothes we were to
wear were neatly placed in piles. There were miners' jackets, miner's
leather trousers, and felt hats. We chose the suits best fitting our
different anatomies, and dressed. My choice fell on a boy's rather
clean suit. We felt very rakish in the dressing-room, but very sheepish
when we joined the gentlemen outside. In going down the shaft we had to
stand on the platform of the cage, which had neither railing nor
support of any kind. We went down thirteen hundred feet and stepped out
into the alleys of the shining ore. After walking for what seemed
miles, they showed us a hole and a shaft. We looked down a hundred feet
deeper, where the men who were working were almost naked. The
thermometer was fabulously high. There was a tank of cold water where
the men who worked could plunge every two minutes out of the five. The
air beginning to be rather oppressive, we requested to be taken up to
our mother Earth. How glad we were to breathe the fresh air. A bath was
awaiting us, and when we became ladies again we were taken all over the
works, and saw the process of making silver bricks out of the walls we
had been walking between, the beating of the metal, the sifting and
weighing, and finally the silver bricks. They have 2,000 men working
day and night. They are 1,400 feet below the surface now, and hope to
go lower. The "pocket" is 175 feet long, but the poor stockholders'