ting of a new flag on the liberty-pole, and later the
ceremony of the Ditch opening, when a distinguished speaker in a most
unworkman-like tall hat, black frock coat, and white cravat, which gave
him the general air of a festive grave-digger, took a spade from the
hands of an apparently hilarious chief mourner and threw out the first
sods. There were anvils, brass bands, and a "collation" at the hotel.
But everywhere--overriding the most extravagant expectation and even
the laughter it provoked--the spirit of indomitable youth and resistless
enterprise intoxicated the air. It was the spirit that had made
California possible; that had sown a thousand such ventures
broadcast through its wilderness; that had enabled the sower to stand
half-humorously among his scant or ruined harvests without fear and
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 secr