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.