"How-do-you-do?" he said, with friendly confidence. Ann murmured a greeting. "I didn't know anyone was on the road. I was thinking rather fiercely, I guess." He started to walk beside her and Ann was glad, for he was of that type whose first appearance attracts by its promise of friendship. "I've been thinking, too," she answered. "Thinking, among other things what a wonderful country this is. I'm from the East, I suppose it is not necessary to say, and this is my first look at your valley." "Manzanita is a great old sweep of country!" he exclaimed, looking out over it. "That valley is a good thing to look at when we think that human anxieties are mighty matters." He smiled, and Ann looked into his face with a new interest and said: "I should think that such an influence as this is would tend to lessen those anxieties; that it would tend to make the people who live near it big, as it is big." He looked away and shook his head slowly. "I hold that theory, too, sometimes ... in my most optimistic hours. But the more I see of the places in which men live, the closer I watch the way we humans react to our physical environments, the less faith I have in it. Some of the biggest, rarest souls I know have developed in the meanest localities and, on the other hand, some of the worst culls of the species I've ever seen have been products of countries so big that they would inspire most men. Perhaps, though, the big men of the small places would have been bigger in a country like this; possibly, those who are found wanting out here would fall even shorter of what we expect of them if they were in less wonderful surroundings."