leaped the narrow fire-guard about the one building and burned up
everything there, except Dean Fenneben. Six years, and nothing
to show for his work on the outside. Inside, the six years'
stay in Kansas had seen the making over of a scholarly dreamer
into a hard-headed, far-seeing, masterful man, who took
the West as he found it, but did not leave it so. Not he!
All the power of higher learning he still held supreme.
But by days of hard work in the college halls, and nights
of meditation out in the silent sanctuary spaces of the prairies
round about him, he had been learning how to compute the needs
of men as the angel with the golden reed computed the walls
and gates of the New Jerusalem--_*according to the measure
of a man_.

Such was Dean Fenneben who came after six years of service to
the little town of Lagonda Ledge to plant Sunrise on the crest above
the Walnut Valley beyond reach of prairie fire or bursting boom.
Firm set as the limestone of its foundations, he reared here
a college that should live, for that its builder himself with his
feet on the ground and his face toward the light had learned
the secret of living.

Miles away across the valley, the dome of Sunrise could be seen by day.
By night, the old college lantern at first, and later the studding
of electric lights, made a beacon for all the open countryside.
But if the wayfarer, by chance or choice, turned his footsteps to those
rocky bluffs and glens beyond the Walnut River, wherefrom the town
of Lagonda Ledge takes its name, he lost the guiding ray from the hilltop
and groped in black and dangerous ways where darkness rules.