And yet perhaps it was the turning-point in his existence. Others who were there from Bullion Flat said afterward that from that night Harding was transfigured. A blaze of chandeliers, with golden fretwork skirting the galleries and rich dark velvet framing the boxes, could hardly surprise him. Nor was there much to astonish--whatever there might be to admire--in the rows of handsomely dressed women who gave brilliancy to the audience. Neither could the drama itself, which the manager was pleased to style "a grand legendary fairy spectacle," move Harding seriously from his equilibrium. All these splendors, together with the resonant orchestra, the dazzling scenery, rich in Dutch metal and gold foil, the sanguinary and crested Baron, the villain of the play, the iridescent youth, its hero, the demons, who went through traps, vampire and other--one Blood-Red Demon with a long nose being especially conspicuous--the fairies, who brought order out of chaos--of whom the "Queen of the Fairy Bower" was the large-limbed and voluptuous principal--the "Amazonian Phalanx," who went through unheard-of manoeuvres with massive tin battle axes and spears--all these failed, it must be owned, to startle Mr. Harding from his propriety. He had seen such things, or things very like them, before. And yet he was taken off his feet, to use the metaphor, and swept away captive by a very torrent of emotion excited by Miss Tinsel. She was only a _coryphée_; that is, she was but one among the minor subordinates of the ballet. Her advent was accomplished as one of the "Sprites of the Silver Shower." She had to come chassezing down the stage, and she never raised her eyelids--before most demurely cast down--until she was close upon the footlights. But when those eyelids _did_ go up it was--well, as Judge Carboy afterward used to say, it was just like sunrise over the mountains at Boone's Bar! A girl with a mass of bright hair, almost red it looked by daylight, and large gray eyes that looked as black as soot by the gas, but took on more tender hues by day--a girl with a figure that was simply perfection, and yet one who with all her archness seemed to have no vanity. She had many dainty white skirts, one above another like an artichoke, of fluffy and diaphanous texture, and although these, it cannot be denied, were perilously short, somehow Miss Tinsel did not look in the least immodest. All the men from Bullion Flat knew it _was_ Miss Tinsel, since the "Queen of the Fairy Bower" addressed this charming figure more than once as "Zephyrind," and a reference to the play-bill thereupon at once established her identity.