Although a resident of San Francisco, I never heard much about the "Art Union Association" of that city until I got hold of some old newspapers during my three months' stay in the Big Tree region of Calaveras county.  Up there, you know, they read every thing, because in most of those little camps they have no libraries, and no books to speak of, except now and then a patent office report or a prayer-book, or literature of that kind, in a general way, that will hang on and last a good while when people are careful with it, like miners; but as for novels, they pass them around and wear them out in a week or two.  Now there was Coon, a nice, bald-headed man at the hotel in Angels' Camp, I asked him to lend me a book, one rainy day; he was silent a moment, and a shade of melancholy flitted across his fine face, and then he said: "Well, I've got a mighty responsible old Webster Unabridged, what there is left of it, but they started her sloshing around and sloshing around and sloshing around the camp before ever I got a chance to read her myself; and next she went to Murphy's, and from there she went to Jackass Gulch, and now she's gone to San Andreas, and I don't expect I'll ever see that book again.  But what makes me mad is, that for all they're so handy about keeping her sashshaying around from shanty to shanty and from camp to camp, none of 'em's ever got a good word for her.  Now Coddington had her a week, and she was too many for him – he couldn't spell the words; he tackled some of them regular busters, tow'rd the middle, you know, and they thronged him; next, Dyer, he tried her a jolt, but he couldn't pronounce 'em – Dyer can hunt quail or play seven-up as well as any man, understand, but he can't pronounce worth a cuss; he used to worry along well enough, though, till he'd flush one of them rattlers with a clatter of syllables as long as a string of sluice-boxes, and then he'd lose his grip and throw up his hand; and so, finally, Dick Stoker harnessed her, up there at his cabin, and sweated over her and cussed over her and rastled with her for as much as three weeks, night and day, till he got as far as R, and then passed her over to 'Lige Pickerell, and said she was the all-firedest dryest reading that ever he struck.  Well, well, if she's come back from San Andreas, you can get her, and prospect her, but I don't reckon there's a good deal left of her by this time, though time was when she was as likely a book as any in the State, and as hefty, and had an amount of general information in her that was astonishing, if any of these cattle had known enough to get it out of her." And ex-corporal Coon proceeded cheerlessly to scout with his brush after the straggling hairs on the rear of his head and drum them to the front for inspection and roll-call, as was his usual custom before turning in for his regular afternoon nap.