Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a great deal; then it
was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard, and then people began to
think, as they are apt to, that he had never been anything else. But the
settlement of Smith's Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily
not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected
tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's Pocket became a settlement, with
its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its
two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling street was
overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions,
imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged
Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more
homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the
population to whom the Sabbath, with a change of linen, brought merely
the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment. Then there
was a Methodist Church, and hard by a Monte Bank, and a little beyond,
on the mountainside, a graveyard; and then a little schoolhouse.

"The Master," as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night
in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully
making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the
extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as
"Riches are deceitful," and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity
of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a
gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof during
the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the opening of the
door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look
up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty
and shabbily clad. Still, her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed,
lusterless black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms
and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him. It was