One Sunday, about the middle of March, while we were sunning ourselves in front of our tent, our attention was attracted by a sudden commotion under the bank, a little to the right of the village, and which was the same so emphatically denounced by the second scientific miner. Hurrying to the spot, we found a large crowd desperately at work digging out two men who had just been buried beneath a large mass of earth. The unfortunate victims of their own guilty imprudence had been picking out the thin stratum of rubble at the bottom of the bank, when the overhanging cliff, which was composed of a fine sand, some twenty feet in depth, fell in sudden ruin on their heads. In about fifteen minutes a shout from one of the workmen proclaimed that one of the bodies had been found. It was a shocking spectacle--blood, and dirt, and death--the head first, falling on the breast, then the nerveless arm, and at last, the whole poor, deserted body--how swift had been the flight of the startled garrison, at that dread alarm, along the winding ways of the heart and veins.
This incident confirmed the remark so often made as to the insensibility of the miner to the fate of his companions. Though there were of course some exceptions, the indifference generally manifested on such occasions seemed to argue that charity and humanity are not the natural spontaneous growth of the human heart, but a forced and artificial production that can exist only in the hot-bed of permanent society. After satisfying their curiosity to hear the name and residence of the deceased, the crowd disperses, and the whole matter is speedily forgotten amid more exciting interests, or remembered only as a bit of gossip a little out of the common course. If the sufferers have any friends to perform for them the last sad offices, they are carried to their final resting-place with little of that solemnity that seems inseparable from such a ceremony; and if not, they are hurried into the ground with still more indecent haste.
Spring was now rapidly advancing. The air, except during rainy weather, was the most delightful that can be imagined, and far warmer than in corresponding latitudes on the Atlantic; the mercury standing at noon on the 25th of March, at 82° in the shade. Flowers of the greatest beauty and variety sprung up, as if by magic, in a single night; there were here no masses of snow and ice whose gradual thaw keeps back the tardy, lingering spring long after the sun has passed the equator; he looked upon the earth with gladsome eye, and every ray was the birth of a flower.