As to the particular matter that gave rise to the saying, Mrs. Mar’s strong personal feeling about it was augmented by outside circumstances. Stories of failure in gold mining were too rife and too well-attested not to have a significance difficult to disregard. Blameless misfortune as well as wholesale swindling, were so much the order of the day in the West, that men of business like the Trennors, when they wanted to promote some mining scheme, must needs have recourse to the gorgeous East. New York had plenty of money for “wildcat” schemes. But no place, the wise would tell you, like conservative old Boston for floating a risky concern. New Englanders were at that distance which lends enchantment. For them gold mining is still a form of romance—the mere thought of it goes to the head like wine. But Valdivia was neither near enough to the mining centers to catch the fever, nor yet so far away but what her citizens mightily feared infection. Had not their townsman, Ben White, lost his head and his fortune over at Huerfano Creek? Wasn’t there young Andrews for a warning! No catastrophe of this kind in their little world lost through Mrs. Mar’s agency any of its ironic usefulness as illustration. She succeeded not only in making her husband doubt the wisdom of giving up a sure thing in the bank, to claim an unworkable gold mine, but little by little, as the rain and the weather wear away the sharp outlines of a stone inscription, so for Nathaniel Mar the years and the unbelief about him brought a gradual blurring of the picture, till even to himself its early outlines were a little dimmed. To revive its actuality, more than for any other purpose, nearly ten years after he had told the story to little Jack Galbraith, he told it again to Mr. Elihu H. Cox. The man listened with such a look in his big, fishy eyes, in a silence so galling, that Mar interposed hurriedly: “And there’s one capital thing about it. It’s safe enough. If the gold’s there, it certainly won’t run away,” and abruptly changed the subject; though to hear himself saying “if it’s there,” rankled in his memory like apostasy. He would never tell the story again till his boys were grown and he told it to them. _They_ would believe him. They, with youth and four sound legs between them, they would go up there and justify the long faith.