Lyon County Times

DRAINAGE AND MINING.

The Shrewd Device of a Hotel Keeper to Secure a Subterranean Drain—Some Random Writing.

Mr. M. Frett, proprietor of the Bonanza Hotel, has set an example of shrewd foresight that other hotel-keepers might profit by following. Three or four weeks ago we alluded to his eccentric enterprise in running a tunnel from Gold Canyon, in the middle of the opposite block, to a point underneath his hotel for the evident purpose of drainage. When the tunnel was started, the blasts that were discharged in displacing the hard porphyry resounded through the town, and people wondered what new mine was being opened so close to their houses. When told that the design of the undertaking was to relieve the Bonanza Hotel of the usual offal about such places they invariably said that the magnitude of the undertaking was greater than the judgment which it displayed. If they were going to put in a drain from their premises to Gold Canyon they would simply dig a ditch across the street in the surface soil and put a capacious trough therein and cover it over. They were all wrong. Such a drain would cost not less than a couple of hundred dollars, and of course it would require repairs at least once in a generation. We did not touch upon this matter as closely as could be wished in the issue wherein the undertaking was noticed, for the reason that a man's private affairs are often too delicate to reveal in detail before a curious public, when the motives, especially, are hidden in the shadow of mystery. Now, however the motives are clear as that either one party or the other will carry Indians, and we are pleased to place Mr. Frett aright before the people.

Yesterday morning The Times reporter visited the tunnel in question, to note progress and see if any mineral developments had been made. He was astonished to see the following notice of location posted up on the door, the latter being firmly secured with a heavy padlock:

Notice of Location.

We the undersigned claim this lead or lode with all its dips, spurs and angles, together with all the mineral therein contained, for an area along its course equivalent to 1,600 feet square, or 400 feet square for each of the undersigned. The claim will be known as the Bonanza, and the public may as well take note here that whosoever attempts to jump it will be shot on the spot, and denied the rites of a Christian burial. We mean business.

M. FRETT.
A. W. PIPER.
C. TRUE.
D. VERMILLYEA.

The notice bears the mark of genuineness, and is signed by the mining recorder of this district. As soon as the reporter read it he was made aware of the designs of the landlord. It was apparent that he had given the matter of drainage considerable thought, and arrived at the present plan. He has at times lately been confined to his room, and it was when thus in the quiet of his chamber, no doubt, that the plan was matured. The brain, it is well known, is more powerful when the body is in a horizontal position than when it is erect, and Tristram Shandy (pardon us for quoting so loose-tongued an author) has shown, with great logic and circumlocution, that pleasure is heightened and pain lessened when one is lying. A certain poetess (Mrs. Browning, we believe) whose health, like Mr. Frett's, was none the best, used to have a blackboard and chalk in her room, and when on the verge of sleep a touching couplet would come to her mind she would rise and go to the board with her eyes shut and put it down. If she ever stopped to light the candle it was gone, never, perhaps, to be recalled. It made no difference how many chairs she stumbled over in getting to the blackboard, so long as she kept her eyes shut she held the couplet. The reader will here naturally think of her poor husband when the Muse thus tore his wife from his arms to bear her on pinions of poetic thought to the blackboard. The Muse, it is important to say (and no doubt the husband found consolation in the fact), is usually regarded as of the feminine gender. Poetry, however, and the habits of poets (they are a singular people) is quite foreign to the matter in hand. This slight excursion among them was unavoidable. There is one more point about the action of the mind when lying that should be noted before we again reach Mr. Frett and his tunnel. It is not put down, so far as our memory serves us, in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the most complete work on psychology up to the date of its publication. The point is this: if any matter weighs heavily on the mind during waking moments it bears down with twice the force just after arousing from slumber. If there is an incubus on the conscience it is magnified ten fold upon waking in the morning. Why this is so we have not the room to explain, nor could we explain it if we had the room. That it is so, every reader who has lain in jail under sentence or awaiting the awful uncertainty of a trial will readily attest. It is invariably found that upon getting up the normal state of fear is restored instantly. Even as soon as one assumes an erect attitude, before sufficient time has elapsed for putting on a pair of slippers, the bugbear has vanished. This fact embodies the strongest plea that we know of for early rising, especially with people who have a deficiency of courage and who constantly labor under fear of something that never hurts them. There are lots of such people.

The cunning device, however, with which Mr. Frett secured the drainage of his premises must be left in part to the imagination of the reader, assisted, as it will be, by the notice published above. We were lead into so many digressions that space does not now remain to allude to it as it should be. How many assessments the company have paid to carry on the tunnel has not transpired. One fourth of those assessments (Mr. Frett's portion) must be something less than the cost of a surface drain. We shall not be surprised to see the stock of the company quoted in the New York Mining Board soon.