Breakfast was in waiting for the young men, and when it was disposed of they were shown again to the parlors and introduced to a score of people who had gathered in to hear the story of Brewster's death from the lips of the men who had taken his body from the deep pit and brought it home for burial. In the conversation which followed two or three hours were consumed. When the callers had gone, Hartwell said: "Gentlemen, I advise you to go to your rooms and try and get some rest. In two or three hours I shall want you to go and make a call with me, if the poor family of my friend can bear it." Late that afternoon Hartwell knocked on the door of the sitting room, which, with sleeping apartments on either side, had been given Harding and Ashley, and when the door was opened, he said: "Gentlemen, please come with me, the children of James Brewster desire to see you!" The young men arose and followed their host. Brewster had always referred to his daughters as his "little girls;" the man who had the young men to go and meet them, spoke of them as "the children of James Brewster." Both Harding and Ashley, as they followed Hartwell, were mentally framing words of comfort to speak to school misses just entering their teens, who were in sorrow. When then, they were ushered into the presence of two thoroughly accomplished young women, and when these ladies, with tears streaming down their faces, came forward, shook their hands, and, in broken words of warmest gratitude, thanked them for all they had done and were doing, and for all they had been to their father in life and in death, the men from the desert were lost in surprise and astonishment. As Harding said later: "I felt as though I was in a drift on the 2,800-foot level, into which no air pipe had been carried." This apparition was all the more startling to them, because during the two or three years that they had been at work on the Comstock, the very nature of their occupation forbade their mingling in the society of refined women to any but a most limited extent. From the papers given the family by Hartwell that day, matters were fully understood by the sister of Brewster and the young ladies, so no explanations were asked. At first the conversation was little more than warm thanks on the part of the young ladies and modest and half incoherent replies. The ladies were in the humble home of their father's widowed sister, Mrs. Wolcott. That they were all poor was apparent from all the surroundings. This fact at length forced its way through the bewildered brain of Harding and furnished him a happy expedient to say something without advertising himself the idiot that he, in that hour, would have been willing to make an affidavit that he was. Said he: "Ladies, amid all the sorrows that we bring to you, we have, what but for your grief would be good news. Tell them, Ashley!"