Next day the sun rose on Bottle Flat in his usual conservative and impassive manner.  Had he respected the dramatic proprieties, he would have appeared with astonished face and uplifted hands, for seldom had a whole community changed so completely in a single night.

Uncle Hans, the only German in the camp, had spent the preceding afternoon in that patient investigation for which the Teutonic mind is so justly noted.  The morning sun saw over Hans’s door a sign, in charcoal, which read, “SHAVIN’ dun Hier”; and few men went to the creek that morning without submitting themselves to Hans’s hands.

Then several men who had been absent from the saloon the night before straggled into camp, with jaded mules and new attire.  Carondelet Joe came in, clad in a pair of pants, on which slender saffron-hued serpents ascended graceful gray Corinthian columns, while from under the collar of a new white shirt appeared a cravat, displaying most of the lines of the solar spectrum.

Flush, the Flat champion at poker, came in late in the afternoon, with a huge watch-chain, and an overpowering bosom-pin, and his horrid fingers sported at least one seal-ring each.

Several stove-pipe hats were visible in camp, and even a pair of gloves were reported in the pocket of a miner.

Yankee Sam had sold out his entire stock, and prevented bloodshed over his only bottle of hair-oil by putting it up at a raffle, in forty chances, at an ounce a chance.  His stock of white shirts, seven in number, were visible on manly forms; his pocket combs and glasses were all gone; and there had been a steady run on needles and thread.  Most of the miners were smoking new white clay pipes, while a few thoughtful ones, hoping for a repetition of the events of the previous day, had scoured their pans to a dazzling brightness.

As for the innocent cause of all this commotion, she was fully as excited as the miners themselves.  She had never been outside of Middle Bethany, until she started for California.  Everything on the trip had been strange, and her stopping-place and its people were stranger than all.  The male population of Middle Bethany, as is usual with small New England villages, consisted almost entirely of very young boys and very old men.  But here at Bottle Flat were hosts of middle-aged men, and such funny ones!  She was wild to see more of them, and hear them talk; yet, her wildness was no match for her prudence.  She sighed to think how slightly Toledo had spoken of the minister on the local committee, and she piously admitted to herself that Toledo and his friends were undoubtedly on the brink of the bottomless pit, and yet—­they certainly were very kind.  If she could only exert a good influence upon these men—­but how?

Suddenly she bethought herself, of the grand social centre of Middle Bethany—­the singing-school.  Of course, she couldn’t start a singing-school at Bottle Flat, but if she were to say the children needed to be led in singing, would it be very hypocritical?  She might invite such of the miners as were musically inclined to lead the school in singing in the morning, and thus she might, perhaps, remove some of the prejudice which, she had been informed, existed against the school.