The changes of time are hard to realize. One knows, of course, that the old man once was young. One understands that the tree once was a sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading tree. But the miracle of growth passes not merely our understanding, but our imagination. So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties--a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,--is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the shady avenues in motor-cars--whatever the records may show, the real truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth cannot fool us. And yet here is the miracle in the making. Always in John Barclay's eyes when he closed them to think of the first years that followed the war between the states, rose visions of yellow pine and red bricks and the litter and debris of building; always in his ears as he remembered those days were the confused noises of wagons whining and groaning under their heavy loads, of gnawing saws and rattling hammers, of the clink of trowels on stones, of the swish of mortar in boxes, and of the murmur of the tide of hurrying feet over board sidewalks, ebbing and flowing night and morning. In those days new boys came to town so rapidly that sometimes John met a boy in swimming whom he did not know, and, even in 1866, when Ellen and Molly Culpepper were giving a birthday party for Ellen, she declared that she "simply couldn't have all the new people there." And so in the sixties the boy and the town went through their raw, gawky, ugly adolescence together. As streets formed in the town, ideas took shape in the boy's mind. As Lincoln Avenue was marked out on the hill, where afterward the quality of the town came to live, so in the boy's heart books that told him of the world outlined vague visions. Boy fashion he wrote to Bob Hendricks once or twice a month or a season, as the spirit moved him, and measured everything with the eyes of his absent friend. For he came to idealize Bob, who was out in the wonderful world, and their letters in those days were curious compositions--full of adventures by field and wood, and awkward references to proper books to read, and cures for cramps and bashfully expressed aspirations of the soul. Bob's father had become a general, and when the war closed, he was sent west to fight the Indians, and he took Lieutenant Jacob Dolan with him, and Bob sent to John news of the Indian fighting that glorified Bob further. And when a letter came to the Ridge from Dolan announcing that he and the Hendricks family were coming back to the Ridge to live,--the