Jim drawled, "When it ain't buttons, it goes to the parson; when it 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."