The most impressive part of the services was when, during the Pope's celebration of the mass, he elevated the host. The whole multitude in the vast church knelt, save here and there a Protestant spectator. The sabres of the noble guard rung for a moment on the pavement; then, after a solemn stillness, a breathless silence, the sound of the silver trumpets came from the dome above, the clear notes seeming to float downwards from heaven itself.

To this provision of spiritual bread succeeded, in the evening, the circenses, which were, the day after, thus described in a private letter from a lady: "The celebrations of the day were finished off by the girandola, or display of fireworks from Monte Pincio. W obtained a comfortable place for me, and at half past eight we set off in a little carriage. After being stopped at the corners of several streets by mounted guards, we finally reached the Ripetta, and driving for a little distance on the bank of the river (which was lighted up with bonfires, producing beautiful effects on the water) we had from this point a view of St. Peter's, which was again illuminated, looking like some. temple of fairy-land. We were only permitted to go within a very short distance of the Piazza [del Popolo], so we alighted, and, mingling with the crowd, soon got to the place where our chairs were waiting for us.

"The commencement was announced by the firing of cannon. Then followed the ascent of some beautiful rockets,

which burst and descended in showers of fire; then a magnificent volcanic irruption preceded the transformation of the great architectural piece which [on this occasion] was St. Peter's, followed by the Fountain of Trevi - into a temple of light. The various changes of form and color were magical, and at each, a signal was given by the cannon. There was not enough wind to carry off the smoke, but as it was lighted up it gave a beauty of its own, though it marred the brilliancy of the whole.

"After a while, a flame of light shot from the Pincian to the base of the obelisk, played around it, and then darted to posts standing about in the piazza, where it lighted the lamps and revealed the crowd in all directions, thus serving the double purpose of a fine finishing off and of lighting up their homeward departure. All was quiet and orderly. The immense mass, estimated at twenty thousand, had enjoyed the fireworks, and, being satisfied, passed away in groups by the three streets which terminate in the Piazza del Popolo. We gained our carriage without trouble or being in any way inconvenienced by the motley crowd about us."

Of one of the special ceremonies of the church at this period, the same correspondent writes:

"While I was at the window [in the Via Sistina, July 8th] I was attracted by a large crowd about the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. I have since learned that it was a procession to take the picture of the Virgina miraculous picture, highly esteemed, having stopped the cholera at one time when it was raging in Rome, from that church to the Gesù, in order there to have prayers to the Virgin for peace. It was attended by the cardinal vicar of Rome and thousands of priests and frati, bearing lighted candles. The picture was brilliantly illuminated, and the people from time to time cried out, 'Ave Maria! Ora pro nobis!""

On the second Sunday following, July 22d, there was another of these solemn processions, to which the Pope resorted for protection in his danger; in honor, however, of an entirely different madonna.

I quote now from a diary of the time: "First, after a line of guards, came two drummers, rattling away at a singular

rate.

Then came a long double row of candle-bearing frati; then a brass band, followed by an immense picture of the Madonna and child, swung from a large gilt rod and two upright staffs, borne by priests. The reverse of this picture represented a saint adoring and imploring the Virgin. After this were a few more priests, and then a huge cross, seemingly of logs. It was about sixteen feet high; the foot, pointed as if to go into the ground, rested in a belt socket of the bearer. It was of pasteboard, but the imitation was perfect, both of the bark and of the section, which was about twelve inches in diameter, and also of a few little ivy vines and leaves twining around it. This was followed by another double row of frati, Dominicans.

"Then came another brass band, some more priests, a mitred bishop bearing a small silver crucifix, and then, the great object of the procession, the shrine of the Madonna. It was much like a throne raised upon an altar, borne by sixteen men, and rising in heavily gilt arabesque forms, supported by cherubs, to a large crown which formed its canopy. In this shrine sat an image of the Virgin, arrayed in a dress of white satin, embroidered heavily with gold, low in the neck and with flowing sleeves. She wore also a jeweled crown. The infant Saviour in her arms was somewhat similarly dressed.

"The people had showed some reverence at the other parts of the procession; but when this shrine came by, the crowds that filled the streets knelt on all sides, more than I think I had

seen before, offering the profoundest worship to the image."

"There is to be still another procession, next Sunday" (July 29th), -quot ing again the private correspondence already cited," to carry back the picture of the Madonna from the church of Il Gesù to that of Santa Maria Maggiore, the Pope having in the mean while presented the miraculous picture with a silver chalice."

On the 30th, the same writer resumes: "In the evening, about six, W————— went to the church to see the procession. The picture was loaded with votive offerings of gold and silver and precious stones. I don't know what effect has been produced upon Italian affairs, but at the appearance of the picture the crowd prostrated themselves in humble adoration. I could see from my window the illumination of the church, which presented the appearance of a pyramid of lights and was very beautiful.”

This procession, it seems, was "some forty minutes in passing." The streets along the route through which it passed were gayly decked with red and yellow tapestries; and at least one private house opposite the church, as well as the campanile of the church itself, was thus illuminated.

During the period of these great July processions, to which far more than to his secular defenders the Pope had confident recourse for protection against the approaching revolution, Garibaldi was pressing his attack upon Messina, the last hold of Francis upon the island of Sicily. On the 30th, the day following this formal and solemn restoration of the miraculous picture to Santa Maria Maggiore, the news reached Rome that Messina was taken, this extraordinary three months' campaign at an end, and Trinacria redeemed for constitutional liberty and Italy. Our good Checca shook her head, and devoutly said that we must accept the decrees of Providence;" the padrone sententiously as

sured us that Garibaldi "would take Naples also in the coming fall, and that he would be in Rome itself ere winter should set in."

There were few left in Rome then to give an unbiased judgment upon such a prophecy. The American minister

was gone. The American church was closed for the summer. The August heats now forced away to the mountains, or to cooler latitudes, the last Americans who yet lingered in Rome. Even the Italian revolution paused again in its advance.

William Chauncy Langdon.

When the wilderness has proved a mockery, refusing to give up its treasures, and the miners have pushed on, leaving behind them no trace except deserted cabins and mounds of tin cans, the names they gave still linger, becoming part of the country's history, and outranking in importance ordinary geographical designations. No doubt, in centuries to come, antiquaries will puzzle and delve over the nomenclatures in all those portions of America now known as "mining regions." It would not be strange, either, if the tin-can mounds ultimately became centres of archæological research. Nothing can be more certain than that, if the human race continues to advance, an age will come which will abhor and repudiate the tin can, with all its sickening contents. After a century or two of disuse and oblivion, the hideous utensil and its still more hideous foods will be relegated to their proper place as relics of a phase of barbarism; and then the exhuming of some of the huge mounds of them, now being piled up in mining - NO. 314. 48

VOL. LII.

camps, will be interesting to all persons curious in such matters. The miner's frying-pan also may come in for a share of analytic attention; will perhaps take a place in museums, in the long procession headed by the Indian's stone mortar and pestle. It may even come about that there will be an age catalogued in the archeologist's lists as the tin age. Contrasted with it, what noble dignity will"the stone age" assume!

Such forerunning fancies as these, sometimes fantastic, sometimes, again, melancholy to the last degree, haunt one in journeying among mining camps, old and new. It is hard to keep separate the fantastic and the sad, in one's impressions; hard to decide which has more pathos, the camp deserted or the camp newly begun, the picture of disappointment over and past or that of enthusiastic hopes, nine out of ten of which are doomed to die. I have sometimes thought that the newest, livest, most sanguine camps were saddest sights of all.

The expression of a fresh mining camp, at the height of its "boom," is something which must be seen to be comprehended.

The camp is in the heart of a fir forest, perhaps, or on the stony sides of a gulch. Trees fall here, there, everywhere, day and night. Nobody draws breath till he has got a cabin, or a bough hut, or a tent over his head. As if by

66

magic, there grows up a sort of street, a dozen or two board shanties, with that cheapest and silliest of all shams, the battlement front, flaunting its ugly squares all along the line. Glaring signs painted on strips of cotton sheeting, bleached and unbleached, are nailed over doors. In next to no time, there will be a "mint," an "exchange," a "bank," a "Vienna bakery," a " Chinese laundry," a "hotel," and a "livery stable." Between each night and morning will blossom out crops of "real estate offices," and places where "mining properties are bought and sold," "claims located, proved, bought and sold," "surveys of mining claims made," etc.; crops also, alas, of whiskey saloons, with wicked names and lurid red curtains, danger and death signals.

The stumps are not taken out of the pretense of a road, neither are the bowlders; nobody minds driving over them, or over anything, in fact, so he gets quick to his "claim," or to the tract in which he is feverishly "prospecting." If a brook trickles through the camp, so much the better; it can do double duty as drain and well. Luckiest they who drink highest up, but they who drink lowest down do not mind. The women, if women there are, are fierce and restless, like the men. They make shifty semblances of homes out of their one-roomed cabins. It is not worth while to have things comfortable, or keep them in order, for there is no knowing whether the camp will turn out to be a good one or not; and tomorrow they may pack up their chattels and move on. At the faintest rumor of a bigger "find," in another camp, the men to whom they belong will be off, and they must follow. They stand in their doorways, idling, wondering, waiting, gossiping, and quarreling. The only placid creatures are the babies, whose simple needs of sun, dirt, and being let alone are amply supplied. They are happy, and they only, in all the camp.

It is a strange life, unnatural, unwholesome, leading to no good, comfortless to a degree which many of those who lead it would not endure a day, except for the hope of great gain, which fires their very veins. The worst of it is that the life is as fascinating as it is unwholesome. "Once a miner always a miner" is a proverb which is little less than an exact truth. The life is simply a gamester's life, with the wide earth for a hazard table, and the instances are rare in which a person who has once come under its spell ever breaks away. It is no uncommon thing, in Colorado, to meet an old gray-haired man who has been prospecting and mining all his life, and has not yet made a dollar, but is buoyantly sure that he will" strike it" soon.

During the autumn of 1880 there were frequently to be seen in the Colorado newspapers, and also in the leading ones of the Eastern States, accounts of new and wonderful discoveries of precious metals and minerals in Gunnison County, Colorado. The excitement was not so intense and sudden as that which followed upon the Leadville finds, but it was sufficient to send thousands of men swarming into the "Gunnison country," as it was called, and to bring into existence, in less than a year, scores of brisk, bustling, "bonanza" mining

towns.

"On to Gunnison!" was the cry throughout the mining population of the State. It is instructive as well as interesting to read now, and on the ground, the descriptions then written and the prophecies then made of some of these towns. There was, perhaps, no exaggeration in the descriptions or the prophecies, applying them to the region at large, for it is undoubtedly one of the richest and most varied in treasures in all Colorado. But the casual observer would hardly believe this, journeying to-day through some of the districts of which, at the beginning of the

"boom," such unbounded successes were predicted. The likelihood of the first being last and the last first was never better proven and shown. There seems, on a closer view of the situations, to have been a half-fantastic analogy between the irregular and unforeseeable human conditions and successions in the country and the puzzling conditions and successions geologically recorded there: veins crossing and outcropping in inexplicable places; crevices and fissures doubling on themselves, twisting and tying knots, tendril-like; deposits and measures due, according to all known antecedents, in one spot appearing in quite another, overlying where they should underlie, going to left where they should go to right, and setting at defiance all the horizontal and vertical conventionalities in well-regulated geological society. Evidently there were periods when something, whether misery or joy, made strange bedfellows underground in Gunnison County. Evidently, also, the law had not then been heard of that as one makes his bed so he must lie; for every mother's son of them, primitive granite, coal-measure sediments, silica, calc-spar, porphyry,

all have shifted around as they liked, century in and out, till a state of things has resulted which puzzles the best experts in rocks and formations.

The town of Crested Butte and its vicinity afford good opportunities for observing these interesting phenomena of both the upper and the under world.

Crested Butte lies among the peaks of the Elk Mountain range, twentyeight miles north of Gunnison City, in a beautiful basin, to the making of which go three mountains, two streams, and many gulches. The town gets its odd and rather high-sounding name at second hand, from the highest mountain in its neighborhood. Why Hayden, in his survey, should have named this sharp, pyramidal peak Crested Butte does not at all appear until one goes some dis

tance north of the mountain. Seen from that side, part of its sky line is a curious jagged cock's-comb sort of crest, which vindicates the first half of the epithet, but leaves the last hardly less inappropriate than before: a peak twelve thousand feet high, its upper half of bare majestic stone, is surely entitled to a rank higher than "Butte."

Crested Butte, more than any other town, is centrally located in relation to the mines of Gunnison County. Every road leading out of the town to east, west, or north brings out before long in a mining camp. It is thus a natural centre of supplies, and has in that one fact alone an excellent reason for being, aside from its own resources, which are already so great that it would be a rash man who undertook to-day to set limit to them. Both south and north of the town are vast coal measures, the extent of which can as yet only be guessed at. Thousands of acres in the immediate outskirts of the village are evidently underlaid by the veins already in working; and similar measures are to be. traced on the terraced fronts of the hills and mountains for many miles to the north and west. Mountains full of silver and gold, and creek beds and gulches close at hand full of fuel to smelt and refine them, what more could the heart of money-lover ask, and what plainer indication could nature give of the chief duty of man in lands thus formed and filled? This would be the miner's creed of predestination in the Crested Butte region.

One need not, however, be either money-seeker, miner, or predestinarian to enjoy Crested Butte and its vicinity. Even to eyes that could not tell trachyte from sandstone, or a coal measure from a granite ledge, the country has treasures to offer. There are many sorts of "claims," "prospectors," and "prospecting."

There is a field of purple asters two miles west of Crested Butte that some