of the manner in which such things are gotten up, except perhaps the said agent sent out to get machinery, but now figuring as a director. I was easily prevailed on to sign an argumentative certificate, and was shown one signed by Robert J. Walker on a much worse hole in the ground than this. I was also informed that New York was not the proper market, which I understand to mean that machinery could not be obtained in New York on the credit of a quartz vein; and in London they would not look at a scheme that did not embrace a million at least, said the agent aforesaid. Therefore he proposed to give me an engraved certificate, declaring that I had paid $8000, which of course I readily accepted when I found that there was no machinery in the case, and that all I had to rest my engraved certificate upon was the one hundredth part of the said hole in the ground, with a doubtful title. The last I heard of this agent was, that he was traveling with his wife upon the Rhine. Whether he was in search of machinery or not, I did not stop to inquire.
Instead of the above being an extraordinary case, I understand that it is about a fair average of the California gold schemes that have been brought upon the stock-market of New York. If the papers are only drawn up in the proper form, the most prudent men in Wall Street are sometimes found to embark their capital before the question has ever been settled whether gold can be successfully obtained from quartz in California.
75 (Return) By reference to a long and able paper on the mines in the hill of Proano (Fresnillo), it appears that one half of the cost of four pumping-engines already in