Johnny Filgee and Jimmy Snyder accepting it as a mysterious something that made Desert Islands accessible at a moment's notice and a trifling outlay, were round-eyed and attentive.

And the culminating information from the master that this event would be commemorated by a half-holiday, combined to make the occasion as exciting to the simple school-house in the clearing as it was to the gilded saloon in the main street.
And so the momentous day arrived, with its two new coaches from Big Bluff containing the specially invited speakers--always specially invited to those occasions, and yet strangely enough never before feeling the extreme "importance and privilege" of it as they did then.
Then there were the firing of two anvils, the strains of a brass band, the hoisting of a new flag on the liberty-pole, and later the ceremony of the Ditch opening, when a distinguished speaker in a most unworkman-like tall hat, black frock coat, and white cravat, which gave him the general air of a festive grave-digger, took a spade from the hands of an apparently hilarious chief mourner and threw out the first sods.

There were anvils, brass bands, and a "collation" at the hotel.
But everywhere--overriding the most extravagant expectation and even the laughter it provoked--the spirit of indomitable youth and resistless enterprise intoxicated the air.

It was the spirit that had made California possible; that had sown a thousand such ventures broadcast through its wilderness; that had enabled the sower to stand half-humorously among his scant or ruined harvests without fear and without repining, and turn his undaunted and ever hopeful face to further fields.

What mattered it that Indian Spring had always before its eyes the abandoned trenches and ruined outworks of its earlier pioneers?
What mattered it that the eloquent eulogist of the Eureka Ditch had but a few years before as prodigally scattered his adjectives and his fortune on the useless tunnel that confronted him on the opposite side of the river?
The sublime forgetfulness of youth ignored its warning or recognized it as a joke.