Excerpt from The Farm and the Fireside, or the Romance of Agriculture: Being Half Hour Sketches of Life in the Country Why did the gold of California remain Untouched towards six thousand years, unless it is admitted that King Solomon knew of it, as the gold of Ophir, when building his memorable temple? It is simply because all the world, the Yankees as Well as others, did not know -it was there. Supposing some visionary scholar had written a book, stating that probably in that region this precious metal existed in profusion. Would such a book have put the whole creation agog in search of it? But, as soon as a few straggling soldiers and sailors from the Mexican War discovered and gathered up by handfuls the shining dust and the solid masses, then there was from every part of the earth, not excepting the Empire of the Sun, an incessant scram ble to share in it. This is all consistent, because the subject now became a matter of fact. Instead of theories and moonshine dreams, here was exhibited to the human senses - vision and feeling - the very thing inlall ages and in all 'countries so much desired. Ordi narily, sensible men must know a thing exists and can be had, before they embark in a stampede for its attainment, leaving every thing else in neglect. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

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