With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life.

They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their early homes.

They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world.

They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.
It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine .-- One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences--dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.
In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print.

It is called "pocket mining" and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little corner.