the samples exposed to view, presuming always that your constitution will stand a mixture of salt butter, Chinese sugar, pickles, and bad brandy. Joe Bellow was an auctioneer, and certainly he understood his business. Long before his sale commenced he would place a keg of butter, or a bag of dried apples, outside his store, and the miners would surround these luxuries like flies. Joe Bellow's object was to get a "crowd" and this accomplished, the auction would commence in this style:

Joe Bellow takes his stand on a cask in the midst of his samples, and startles you suddenly with "And I'm only bid one dollar for a dozen of mixed pickles; one dollar, one dollar, one doll-try them, gentlemen." In the meantime Joe nods to an imaginary bidder in the distance, and rattles on, "One and a half, one and a half, one and h—""Doo," says a Dutchman, with his mouth full of pickled gherkin. "Two dollars I'm offered for a dozen of mixed pickles." "Dos y medio," says a Spaniard, under the influence of a green bean. "Ah! Senor Don Pacheco," says Joe, "son los escabeches d'Inghelterra, muy buenos, muy finos!"

"Have I any advance on two dollars and a half?" "Trois piastres," says a French restaurateur. "Three dollars I am bid for a dozen of pickles that cost five dollars in the States, Tenez! Monsieur Leon voici

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des cornichons comme il faut. Three dollars, three doll's, three doll's"-" Dree-and-a-half," says the Dutchman, to whom they are finally knocked down, just as an old miner observes that "darn him if his knife aint turned blue with the darned vitrol juice." No description, however, can do justice to the rapidity with which Joe Bellow knocks down his lots, or to the easy impudence with which he meets all disparaging remarks from his tasters; and such is human nature, that even in the mines, where few simpletons are to be found, there was no butter so rancid but Joe Bellow could dispose of it on a Sunday by means of his volubility and soft-sawder ! I heard a Dutchman enquiring very anxiously one day for some one in Sonora whose name he did not know;-"What is he like?" said one, but the Dutchman was apparently not apt at description, and no clue could be gained; at last he spluttered out, "Tyfel! I mean dat man dat cries always bickel, bickel, bickel,'" and everybody knew at once that Joe Bellow was the individual required, and directed the Dutchman accordingly.

The auction extending as it does across the street will be interrupted most probably by a Mexican funeral procession, headed by a brass band, playing dolefully; scarcely has this filed by when the same