without repining, and turn his undaunted and ever hopeful face to
further fields. What mattered it that Indian Spring had always before
its eyes the abandoned trenches and ruined outworks of its earlier
pioneers? What mattered it that the eloquent eulogist of the Eureka
Ditch had but a few years before as prodigally scattered his adjectives
and his fortune on the useless tunnel that confronted him on the
opposite side of the river? The sublime forgetfulness of youth ignored
its warning or recognized it as a joke. The master, fresh from his
little flock and prematurely aged by their contact, felt a stirring
of something like envy as he wandered among these scarcely older
enthusiasts.

Especially memorable was the exciting day to Johnny Filgee, not only for
the delightfully bewildering clamor of the brass band, in which, between
the trombone and the bass drum, he had got inextricably mixed; not only
for the half-frightening explosions of the anvils and the maddening
smell of the gunpowder which had exalted his infant soul to sudden and
irrelevant whoopings, but for a singular occurrence that whetted his
always keen perceptions. Having been shamelessly abandoned on the
veranda of the Eureka Hotel while his brother Rupert paid bashful court
to the pretty proprietress by assisting her in her duties, Johnny gave
himself up to unlimited observation. The rosettes of the six horses, the
new harness, the length of the driver's whiplash, his enormous buckskin
gloves and the way he held his reins; the fascinating odor of shining
varnish on the coach, the gold-headed cane of the Honorable Abner Dean:
all these were stored away in the secret recesses of Johnny's memory,
even as the unconsidered trifles he had picked up en route were
distending his capacious pockets. But when a young man had alighted
from the second or "Truly" coach among the REAL passengers, and strolled
carelessly and easily in the veranda as if the novelty and the occasion