Perhaps you remember that celebrated "North Ophir?" I bought that mine.
It was very rich in pure silver. You could take it out in lumps as large
as a filbert. But when it was discovered that those lumps were melted
half dollars, and hardly melted at that, a painful case of "salting" was
apparent, and the undersigned adjourned to the poorhouse again.

I paid assessments on "Hale and Norcross" until they sold me out, and I
had to take in washing for a living--and the next month that infamous
stock went up to $7,000 a foot.

I own millions and millions of feet of affluent silver leads in Nevada
--in fact the entire undercrust of that country nearly, and if Congress
would move that State off my property so that I could get at it, I would
be wealthy yet. But no, there she squats--and here am I. Failing health
persuades me to sell. If you know of any one desiring a permanent
investment, I can furnish one that will have the virtue of being eternal.

I have been through the California mill, with all its "dips, spurs and
angles, variations and sinuosities." I have worked there at all the
different trades and professions known to the catalogues. I have been
everything, from a newspaper editor down to a cow-catcher on a
locomotive, and I am encouraged to believe that if there had been a few
more occupations to experiment on, I might have made a dazzling success
at last, and found out what mysterious designs Providence had in creating
me.

But you perceive that although I am not a Pioneer, I have had a
sufficiently variegated time of it to enable me to talk Pioneer like a
native, and feel like a Forty-Niner. Therefore, I cordially welcome you