Four men and ten women, to be exact, of those who chanced to notice Barbara’s somewhat absurd little advertisement, cut it out of the doomed sheet, and placed it in securer quarters, for further consideration. Of the women four wrote to Barbara asking for references; of the men, one conceived it to be “a business opportunity,” not to be written of here; one was a widower blessed with three small unruly children and little appetite for further matrimonial experience; another a rich, crabbed old miser, bent on escaping designing relatives, and the fourth an enterprising young mining engineer, very deeply in love with a pretty girl and anxious to marry her and take her with him to a region remote from civilization. The girl had sighed, demurred, wept—she was of the delicate, clinging vine variety, and totally unfit for the hard experiences of a mining camp. But to this fact the amorous engineer was quite naturally oblivious. He dilated glowingly upon the wonderful efficiency of Chinese servants, who could, he assured her, beat creation in the expert disguising of the inevitable “canned goods,” which formed the staple of provision. Her questions and those of her mother elicited the fact that there were no women to be hired in any capacity, the wives of the miners, for the most part, being of a free and independent nature, and, moreover, entirely occupied with their own affairs. Mamma looked at Ethel, and Ethel looked at Mamma; Mamma’s glance being dubious and Ethel’s timidly imploring. “I couldn’t think of allowing darling Ethel to go away out there to that dreary, lonely place, with no one to wait on her and take care of her except a Chinese man,” Mamma said tearfully. She added that Ethel was delicate, very delicate. “The mountain air will make her strong,” declared the engineer enthusiastically. Then he gazed lovingly at the slight, pale, fashionably gowned young woman who somehow managed to hold the wealth of his honest affections in her small, highly manicured hands, and in whom he fancied all possible happiness was embodied “forever” (as he would have put it). The end of it all was Mamma’s ultimatum, strongly backed up by Ethel’s dutiful acquiescence, to the effect that a suitable maid must be secured; a person who would combine in one the capabilities of cook, ladies’ maid, seamstress, and nurse, and who would accompany the timid bride on her long journey away from Mamma’s side. Imagine, then, the bridegroom’s dilemma, and his anxiety to secure the advertising young person, who upon further inquiry promised so exactly to fill the conditions of his happiness. These persons, therefore, or their representatives foregathered at the Preston farm on the morning of the eighteenth of May. With them also appeared a half dozen or so of neighbors, curious and prying, and the usual complement of shabby individuals, mysteriously aware of the unusual, and always to be seen at village weddings, funerals, and public auctions.