he bore his elevation equally without ostentation or dignity.
Bidden to banquets, and forced by his position as director or
president into the usual gastronomic feats of that civilization and
period, he partook of simple food, and continued his old habit of
taking a cup of coffee with milk and sugar at dinner. Without
professing temperance, he drank sparingly in a community where
alcoholic stimulation was a custom. With neither refinement nor an
extended vocabulary, he was seldom profane, and never indelicate.
With nothing of the Puritan in his manner or conversation, he
seemed to be as strange to the vices of civilization as he was to
its virtues. That such a man should offer little to and receive
little from the companionship of women of any kind was a foregone
conclusion. Without the dignity of solitude, he was pathetically
alone.

Meantime, the days passed; the first six months of his opulence
were drawing to a close, and in that interval he had more than
doubled the amount of his discovered fortune. The rainy season set
in early. Although it dissipated the clouds of dust under which
Nature and Art seemed to be slowly disappearing, it brought little
beauty to the landscape at first, and only appeared to lay bare the
crudenesses of civilization. The unpainted wooden buildings of
Rough-and-Ready, soaked and dripping with rain, took upon
themselves a sleek and shining ugliness, as of second-hand
garments; the absence of cornices or projections to break the
monotony of the long straight lines of downpour made the town
appear as if it had been recently submerged, every vestige of
ornamentation swept away, and only the bare outlines left. Mud was
everywhere; the outer soil seemed to have risen and invaded the
houses even to their most secret recesses, as if outraged Nature