t is,
the parson's wife gits in."

"You 'ain't got no wife," objected Bone.

"That's why there ain't goin' to be no buttons," sagely answered the
miner. "On the square, though, boys, this is all for the little
skeezucks, to buy some genuine milk, from Miss Doc Dennihan's goat."

"What we goin' to put our offerings into?" asked the blacksmith, as the
boys made ready with their contributions. "They used to hand around a
pie-plate when I was a boy."

"We'll try to get along with a hat," responded Jim, "and Keno here can
pass it 'round. I've often observed that a hat is a handy thing to
collect things in, especially brains."

So the hat went quickly from one to another, sagging more and more in
the crown as it travelled.

The men had come forward to surround the anvil, with the tiny little
chap upon its massive top, and not one in all the groups was there who
did not feel that, left alone with the timid bit of a pilgrim, he could
get him to talking and laughing in the briefest of moments.

The hymns with which old Jim had promised the meeting should conclude
were all but forgotten. Two or three miners, whose hunger for song was
not to be readily appeased, kept bringing the subject to the fore
again, however, till at length they were heard.

"We're scarin' little Skeezucks, anyhow," said the brawny smith, once
more reviving the fire in the forge.

"Let's sing 'In the Sweet By-and-By,' if all of us know it," suggested
a young fellow scarcely more than a lad. "It's awful easy."

"Wal, you start her bilin'," replied the teamster.

The young fellow blushed, but he nerved himself to the point and sang
out, nervously at first, and then, when his confidence increased, in a
clear, ringing tenor of remarkable purity, recalling the old-time words
that once were so widely known and treasured:

"'There's a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar,
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling-place there.'"

Then the chorus of voices, husky from neglect and crude from lack of
culture, joined in the chorus, with a heartiness that shook the dingy
building:

"'In the sweet by-and-by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by-and-by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.'"

They followed this with what they knew of "Home, Sweet Home," and so at
last strolled out into the sunshine of the street, and surrounded the
quaint little foundling, as he