making a tour of California, was on the coach one day going through the pass, and preserved the memory of what he saw there in a well-known picture entitled “Dancing Nymph and Satyr,” said by competent critics to be “replete with the study of Greek life.”  This did not affect Rocky Canyon, where the study of mythology was presumably displaced by an experience of more wonderful flesh-and-blood people, but later it was remembered with some significance.

Among the improvements already noted, a zinc and wooden chapel had been erected in the main street, where a certain popular revivalist preacher of a peculiar Southwestern sect regularly held exhortatory services.  His rude emotional power over his ignorant fellow-sectarians was well known, while curiosity drew others.  His effect upon the females of his flock was hysterical and sensational.  Women prematurely aged by frontier drudgery and child-bearing, girls who had known only the rigors and pains of a half-equipped, ill-nourished youth in their battling with the hard realities of nature around them, all found a strange fascination in the extravagant glories and privileges of the unseen world he pictured to them, which they might have found in the fairy tales and nursery legends of civilized children, had they known them.  Personally he was not attractive; his thin pointed face, and bushy hair rising on either side of his square forehead in two rounded knots, and his long, straggling, wiry beard dropping from a strong neck and shoulders, were indeed of a common Southwestern type; yet in him they suggested something more.  This was voiced by a miner who attended his first service, and as the Reverend Mr. Withholder rose in the pulpit, the former was heard to audibly ejaculate, “Dod blasted!—­if it ain’t Billy!” But when on the following Sunday, to everybody’s astonishment, Polly Harkness, in a new white muslin frock and broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, appeared before the church door with the real Billy, and exchanged conversation with the preacher, the likeness was appalling.

I grieve to say that the goat was at once christened by Rocky Canyon as “The Reverend Billy,” and the minister himself was Billy’s “brother.”  More than that, when an attempt was made by outsiders, during the service, to inveigle the tethered goat into his old butting performances, and he took not the least notice of their insults and challenges, the epithet “blanked hypocrite” was added to his title.

Had he really reformed?  Had his pastoral life with his nymph-like mistress completely cured him of his pugnacious propensity, or had he simply found it was inconsistent with his dancing, and seriously interfered with his “fancy steps”?  Had he found tracts and hymn-books were as edible as theatre posters?  These were questions that Rocky canyon discussed lightly, although there was always the more serious mystery of the relations of the Reverend Mr. Withholder, Polly Harkness, and the goat towards each other.  The appearance of Polly