il that moment appreciated his good fortune!

He looked at his watch. It was nearly half-an-hour since he had entered
the mine. He stamped his feet on the plank and rubbed his hands together
to get up the circulation, and then he pulled out a cigar and lighted
it. The first whiff permeated his being with a sense as of food and
drink, sunshine and sweet air.

The rest of the descent was accomplished by means of a succession of
ropes suspended from a succession of platforms.

An hour later, when the wagon drove up to the mouth of the tunnel, Mr.
Fetherbee was found standing serenely there, with a half finished cigar
between his lips, gazing abstractedly at the landscape.

"Hullo, Fetherbee!" Dayton sung out, as they approached. "How was it?"

"First rate!" came the answer, in a voice of suppressed elation, which
Allery Jones noted and was at something of a loss to interpret.

"Was it all your fancy pictured?" he asked, in rather a sceptical tone.

"All and more!" Mr. Fetherbee declared.

He mounted into the wagon, and the horses started on the home-stretch,
not more joyful in the near prospect of their well-earned orgie of oats
and hay than Mr. Fetherbee in the feast of narration which was spread
for him. Finding it impossible to contain himself another moment, he
cried, with an exultant ring in his voice: "But I say, you fellows!
_I've had an adventure!_"

Then, as they bowled along through a winding valley in which the early
September twilight was fast deepening, Mr. Fetherbee gave his initial
version of what has since become a classic, known among the
ever-increasing circle of Mr. Fetherbee's friends as--"An adventure I
once had!"

IX.

AN AMATEUR GAMBLE.

The mining boom was on, and Springtown, that famous Colorado
health-resort and paradise of idlers, was wide awake to the situation.
The few rods of sidewalk which might fairly be called "the street," was
thronged all day with eager speculators. Everybody was "in it," from the
pillars of society down to the slenderest reed of an errand boy who
could scrape together ten dollars for a ten-cent stock. As a natural
consequence real estate was, for the moment, as flat as a poor joke, and
people who had put their money into town "additions" were beginning to
think seriously of planting potatoes where they had once dreamed of
rearing marketable dwelling-houses.

Hillerton, the oldest real-estate man in town, was one of the few among
the fraternity who