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