Thus when Barbara Preston was impelled, she knew not how, to send forth her strange and piteous little appeal to the unknown, it found instant response, and proceeded to fit itself into the scheme of things as perfectly and as cunningly as a tiny bit in a picture puzzle. The paper in which it appeared passed into the hands of a great number of persons, who glanced carelessly at its glaring headlines or searched painstakingly through its losts and founds or things offered, or help wanted, according to their varied tastes or necessities. On the second day thereafter, as was also to be expected, the particular edition containing the queer little unclassified appeal, found its way to many ash-cans, waste-paper baskets, bureau drawers, and pantry shelves; in its progress it helped to build numberless fires, it wrapped parcels of every conceivable shape and size; it fluttered out of car windows, across decks of steamers and ferry-boats; it floated and dissolved in many waterways, and finally disappeared, swallowed in the abyss which appears always to yawn for all things of human creation. Having vanished mysteriously, unobtrusively, as must every printed page sooner or later, it nevertheless left its mark on the lives of many. Plans were changed, voyages undertaken or abandoned, marriages made and unmade. In a word, prosperity, ruin, joy, sadness, glory, despair—all came about through its appearance, and persisted in ever widening circles after it had passed from sight and mind.
Four men and ten women, to be exact, of those who chanced to notice Barbara’s somewhat absurd little advertisement, cut it out of the doomed sheet, and placed it in securer quarters, for further consideration. Of the women four wrote to Barbara asking for references; of the men, one conceived it to be “a business opportunity,” not to be written of here; one was a widower blessed with three small unruly children and little appetite for further matrimonial experience; another a rich, crabbed old miser, bent on escaping designing relatives, and the fourth an enterprising young mining engineer, very deeply in love with a pretty girl and anxious to marry her and take her with him to a region remote from civilization. The girl had sighed, demurred, wept—she was of the delicate, clinging vine variety, and totally unfit for the hard experiences of a mining camp. But to this fact the amorous engineer was quite naturally oblivious. He dilated glowingly upon the wonderful efficiency of Chinese servants, who could, he assured her, beat creation in the expert disguising of the inevitable “canned goods,” which formed the staple of provision. Her questions and those of her mother elicited the fact that there were no women to be hired in any capacity, the wives of the miners, for the most part, being of a free and independent nature, and, moreover, entirely occupied with their own affairs.