of trees in every street in town. He learned to tell at a glance and with
relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut out of a tree. He built
imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees that lined the streets. He
even tried to figure out a way to utilize the small limbs cut from the tops
of the trees, and one Sunday went into the wood back of the town and cut a
great armful of twigs, which he carried to his room and later with great
patience wove into the form of a basket.




BOOK TWO


CHAPTER III


Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West,
long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate
the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live and to try
to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now and has a
population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time for the
telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not yet come.

From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies in
the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just above the
town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing swiftly along
over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads out, but the
hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the north. In the days
before the factories came the land immediately about town was cut up into