The guide said that this old Chinaman was sixty-eight
years of age, and that he had had a life of varied experience. He was
a miner by profession, but had spent all his earnings long ago, and
was now an object of charity as well as of pity. Indeed he was the
very embodiment of misery, a wretched, woebegone, human being! He had
lost one arm in an accident during his mining days. Chinamen in the
thirst for gold had mining claims as well as Anglo-Saxons. This desire
for the precious metal seems to be universal. All men more or less
love gold; and for its acquisition they will undergo great hardship,
face peril, risk their lives. This aged Chinaman for whom there was no
future except to join his ancestors in another life, was now a pauper
notwithstanding all his quest for the treasures of the mines; and his
chief solace, if it be comfort indeed to have the senses benumbed
periodically, or daily, and then wake up to the consciousness of loss
and with a feeling of despair betimes, was in his opium pipe, which he
smoked fifty times a day at the cost of half a dollar, the offering
of charity, the dole received from his pitying countrymen or the
interested traveller who might come to his forlorn abode.
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