Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/377

Charles Dickens] the hall she saw a letter lying on the table addressed to her. It was the letter from Walter Joyce.

over the mountain trails almost anywhere in California, no matter how remote and solitary may be your route, you can scarcely fail to meet a curious figure—sloping-eyed, yellow-complexioned, with a shaved head, and pigtail carefully secured in a twisted knot behind; clad in a loose cloth or calico garment, half shirt, half jacket; trousers equally wide; a long bamboo pole over his shoulder, on either end of which, carefully balanced, are a sack of rice, a piece of pork, and a heterogeneous mass of mining tools; and, over all, the head of this strange individual is covered with a hat made of slips of bamboo, the brim of which equals in breadth a moderately sized umbrella. This is John Chinaman from home, finding his fortune. He always answers to the name of "John." He follows many ways of making his modicum of rice; and the representative of Chinese industry in this case is "Mining John." The white miners only allow him to labour at the poorer diggings, or at others which have been so well wrought over, as no longer to yield returns enough to satisfy their ideas as to wages. Accordingly, we find John at work in some remote locality which the stronger race has deserted, or which is too poor to tempt them to drive out the Chinese. In former times, this was frequently done; and in the old California newspapers reports of such outrages, or of meetings at which resolutions to do so were passed, are quite common. Some years ago I had occasion to pass a few days with some Chinese miners in the mountains. They numbered some twenty men, and occupied the deserted cabins of the miners who had formerly wrought in the locality. Every morning they would go down to the river side, and labour, steadily washing the gravel for gold until mid-day, when their slight meal of rice and vegetables was partaken of. At six o'clock, or thereabout, they stopped work for the day; and after carefully washing themselves in the river, they prepared supper. I was the only white there, and had made an arrangement with them about my meals. Accordingly my supper was first prepared: an office which I generally superintended, as they had, according to my observation, a nasty habit of incorporating rattlesnakes, frogs, slugs, and "such small deer," in their stews. After supper they would look to their little patches of water melons, cabbages, &c.; and their head man would talk to me about his daily life, or the province he had come from, and to which he hoped before long to return. The greater portion of them, however, after they had weighed out the proceeds of the day's labour and allotted each man his share by the aid of a suan-pan (a sort of miniature Babbage's calculating machine) would place themselves on their sleeping benches, put a little tray before them on which were all the materials for smoking, and soon drug themselves into a dreaming stupidity with the fumes of opium. Their huts were situated amid the most beautiful scenery, by the banks of a fine river, over which cataracts from the snow-capped mountains in the distance fell gurgling or roaring into the waters below. But for all this, on which I never tired of gazing, my hosts seemed to care little. They had no visitors, save an Indian on horseback now and then, who treated them very cavalierly and rarely dismounted. On Sundays they generally laid over from work, not from any religious motive, as they were Buddhists, but merely as a day of rest; and sometimes, if they had been more than ordinarily successful, one of them would go to the town or trading port, distant some ten miles, and buy some provisions and a bottle of a beverage called (I quote the label) "fine Old Tom," over which they made very merry for a few hours, playing a rude description of musical instrument sounding like a paralytic drum. They made, however, poor pay, generally not more than three or four shillings per diem each; though now and then they would come on a lucky pocket, and return in the evening grinning from ear to ear. The ground was, however, getting exhausted, and they were then talking of putting their household gods on the bamboo pole, and of removing to some more favoured locality which they had heard of. Go down into almost any town or village, and you will find John moving about with that same silent air of his. Here he generally follows the business of a laundryman. All through the by-streets and suburbs you can see his little cabin with a signboard informing that here lives—"Whang Ho. Washing and Ironing. Buttons sewed on;" and, peeping through the window, you see the proprietor busily at work clear starching, or ironing out the frills on the shirt bosom of probably the governor himself. He has a large pan full of lighted charcoal, which he uses as a "flat iron," and his mouth is full of water, which he most adroitly sprinkles over the linen in a fine shower. If you have any foul clothes, he will follow you home, take them away, and return them again in a day or two, charging about sixpence apiece for his trouble—bargaining, however, that he has not to find linen collars for paper ones which may have been dropped in. From the frequent warnings of washing John on this subject, I suspect that it is a custom of the colonial gentlemen, by which our friend has suffered in time past.

In the suburbs of every town agricultural John is busy at work, clearing the most unlikely pieces of ground, for the purpose of raising vegetables for the town market. These farmers, or rather market gardeners, are generally in companies of three or four; and if you pass that way, you can generally find one or other of the bucolic partnership driving the old cart and still older horse either from