Trying to Find Europe

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. There was another thing that worried me while we were miners. According to some lovely stories that I once read about some gold miners in California who let a nice man named Mr. Harte into all their private affairs, and never found any fault with him when he printed all they told him in the newspaper, all miners in California chew tobacco. I thought it all over. I hated the idea of chewing tobacco; but then if we were miners I thought we ought to do what other miners did. So I told Mike that I was very sorry, but it would really be necessary for him to get some tobacco and to help me chew it while we were at work. All right, said Mike, I'll chew anything you say; but there's another thing you're after forgittin'. Accordin' to Uncle Pathrick ivery miner swears a blue streak pretty much all the time; so you see if we're goin' to do things in rale rigular style we've got to swear. That was something I wouldn't do for anybody; so I thought that as long as we were going to work without swearing it wouldn't do any particular harm to work without chewing tobacco. It may be that only gold miners and coal miners chew and swear, and that it isn't necessary for nail miners to do anything of the kind. At any rate we didn't do it, and I afterwards made up my mind that I wouldn't do it for all the nail mines in the world. About the first of July, after working three weeks, we had dug a shaft ten feet deep, and we began to dig a gallery in the direction of the place where we had found what miners call a surface show of nails . We made the roof of the gallery as high as we could reach with our tools, for we thought it very likely that we might miss the vein by digging too deep. We made a little ladder to help us get down to the bottom of the shaft, and...