All these questions showed how close had been the attention with which they had listened. To every one of them, without exception, the land-lord responded in the most unhesitating and the most comprehensive manner. It was evident that he had turned over every point in his mind that they now suggested; that he was familiar with every objection, and was armed and equipped at all points with facts and arguments to sustain his theory. That there were plenty of objections to that theory became evident from the landlord’s own very frequent allusions to them, and it seemed, by the way in which he spoke of them, as though he himself had often and often done battle with scornful or sceptical opponents. “For my own part,” said the landlord, “I don’t think much of any of these objections. Objections are easy enough to make. You can make them to anything you like--or don’t like. The truest things in the world meet with lots of unbelievers, who offer objections. Now, I know this whole story to be true, and I don’t value the objections a rush. “Ono objection, for instance, is, that the story of the first diggers had been exaggerated in every particular. In passing from mouth to mouth, they say, each one has added to it, and that all the little circumstances that I have mentioned have been either thrown in to make up a story, or colored so as to favor a belief in the money-hole. Now, as to that, all I can say is, that the two men always told a straight story, without any additions, and the younger one lived down to my time, and so could easily be referred to by any ono. He always made the same statement. “A great objection is, that two men could never have dug down so far, and stayed up the sides of the pit, as the story said they did. It has been asserted that they couldn’t have dug down more than twenty or thirty feet, and that they probably got down that far when they came to the water, which prevented them from going any farther. To which I answer, not only that two men could have dug a hundred feet, but that they have done so, over and over, on the same ground, for in the holes made since, it isn’t possible for more than two to work at the same time. The shafts are only about six feet long by three wide, and in that space there isn’t room for more than two, of course.