here in a
well-known picture entitled "Dancing Nymph and Satyr," said by competent
critics to be "replete with the study of Greek life." This did not
affect Rocky Canyon, where the study of mythology was presumably
displaced by an experience of more wonderful flesh-and-blood people, but
later it was remembered with some significance.

Among the improvements already noted, a zinc and wooden chapel had been
erected in the main street, where a certain popular revivalist preacher
of a peculiar Southwestern sect regularly held exhortatory services. His
rude emotional power over his ignorant fellow-sectarians was well known,
while curiosity drew others. His effect upon the females of his flock
was hysterical and sensational. Women prematurely aged by frontier
drudgery and child-bearing, girls who had known only the rigors and
pains of a half-equipped, ill-nourished youth in their battling with the
hard realities of nature around them, all found a strange fascination in
the extravagant glories and privileges of the unseen world he pictured
to them, which they might have found in the fairy tales and nursery
legends of civilized children, had they known them. Personally he was
not attractive; his thin pointed face, and bushy hair rising on
either side of his square forehead in two rounded knots, and his long,
straggling, wiry beard dropping from a strong neck and shoulders,
were indeed of a common Southwestern type; yet in him they suggested
something more. This was voiced by a miner who attended his first
service, and as the Reverend Mr. Withholder rose in the pulpit, the
former was heard to audibly ejaculate, "Dod blasted!--if it ain't
Billy!" But when on the following Sunday, to everybody's astonishment,
Polly Harkness, in a new white muslin frock and broad-brimmed Leghorn
hat, appeared before the church door with the real Billy, and exchanged
conversation with the preacher, the likeness was appalling.

I grieve to say that the goat was at once christened by Rocky Canyon as
"The Reverend Billy," and the minister himself was Billy's "brother."
More than that, when an attempt was made by outsiders, during
the service, to inveigle the tethered goat into his old butting
performances, and he took not the least notice of their insults and
challenges, the epithet "blanked hypocrite" was added to his title.

Had he really reformed? Had his pastoral life with his nymph-like
mistress completely cured him of his pugnacious propensity,