speak for a moment. Then he faltered: "Why, yes,--yes,--I see! Well, ma, what--" And at the cloud on her brow Lycurgus hesitated again, and rolled his apron about his hands nervously and finally said, "Oh--well--whatever you and her ma think will be all right with me, I guess." And having been dismissed telepathically, Lycurgus hurried back to his work. It was when John Barclay was elected President of the Corn Belt Railway, in the early nineties, that Lycurgus told McHurdie and Ward and Culpepper and Frye, as the graybeards wagged around the big brown stove in the harness shop one winter day: "You know ma, she never saw much in him, and when I came in the room she was about to tell him he couldn't have her. Now, isn't that like a woman?--no sense about men. But I says: 'Ma, John Barclay's got good blood in him. His grandpa died worth a million,--and that was a pile of money for them days;' so I says, 'If Jane Mason wants him, ma,' I says, 'let her have him. Remember what a fuss your folks made over me getting you,' I says; 'and see how it's turned out.' Then I turned to John--I can see the little chap now a-standing there with his dicky hat in his hand and his pipe-stem legs no bigger than his cane, and his gray eyes lookin' as wistful as a dog's when you got a bone in your hand, and I says, 'Take her along, John; take her along and good luck go with you,' I says; 'but,' I says, 'John Barclay, I want you always to remember Jane Mason has got a father.' Just that way I says. I tell you, gentlemen, there's nothing like having a wife that respects you." The crowd in the harness shop wagged their heads, and Lycurgus went on: "Now, they ain't many women that would just let a man stand up like that and, as you may say, give her daughter right away under her nose. But my wife, she's been well trained." In the pause that followed, Watts McHurdie's creaking lever was the only sound that broke the silence. Then Watts, who had been sewing away at his work with waving arms, spoke, after clearing his throat, "I've heard many say that she was sich." And the old man cackled, and it became a saying-among them and in the town. One who goes back over the fifty years that have passed since Sycamore Ridge became a local habitation and a name finds it difficult to realize that one-third of its life was passed before the panic of '78, which closed the Hendricks' bank. For those first nineteen years passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen years seem the longest and the best. And that fateful year of '73 to them seems the most portentous. For then, perhaps for the first time, they realized the cruel uncertainty of the struggle for existence. With the terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved