dreams, she always stepped on her feet. But that was a long time ago,
and men and women have been born and loved, and married and brought
children into the world since then. For it was a long time ago.




CHAPTER IV


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