Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn rioted in their twenties. John Hollander saved a bleeding country, pervaded the courthouse and did the housework at home while Rhoda, his wife, who couldn't cook hard boiled eggs, organized the French Cooking Club. Captain Ezra Morton spent his mental energy upon the invention of a self-heating molasses spigot, which he hoped would revolutionize the grocery business while his physical energy was devoted to introducing a burglar proof window fastener into the proud homes that were dotting the tall grass environs of Harvey. Amos Adams was hearing rappings and holding-high communion with great spirits in the vasty deep. Daniel Sands, having buried his second wife, was making eyes at a third and spinning his financial web over the town. Dr. and Mrs. Nesbit were marvelling at the mystery of a child's soul, a maiden's soul, reaching out tendril after tendril as the days made years. The Dick Bowman's were holding biennial receptions to the little angels who came to the house in the Doctor's valise--and welcomed, hilariously welcomed babies they were--welcomed with cigars and free drinks at Riley's saloon by Dick, and in awed silence by Lida, his wife--welcomed even though the parents never knew exactly how the celestial guests were to be robed and harped; while the Joe Calvins of proud Elm Street, opulent in an eight room house, with the town's one bath tub, scowled at the angels who kept on coming nevertheless--for such is the careless and often captious way of angels that come to the world in the doctor's black bag--kept on coming to the frowning house of Calvin as frequently and as idly as they came to the gay Bowmans. Looking back on those days a generation later, it would seem as if the whole town were a wilderness of babies. They came on the hill in Elm Street, a star-eyed baby named Ann even came to the Daniel Sandses, and a third baby to the Ezra Mortons and another to the Kollanders (which gave Rhoda an excuse for forming a lifelong habit of making John serve her breakfast in bed to the scorn of Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Herdicker who for thirty years sniffed audibly about Rhoda's amiable laziness) and the John Dexters had one that came and went in the night. But down by the river--there they came in flocks. The Dooleys, the McPhersons, the Williamses and the hordes of unidentified men and women who came to saw boards, mix mortar, make bricks and dig--to them the kingdom of Heaven was very near, for they suffered little children and forbade them not. And also, because the kingdom was so near--so near even to homes without sewers, homes where dirt and cold and often hunger came--the children were prone to hurry back to the Kingdom discouraged with their little earthly pilgrimages. For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and drawn water in the town's first days seemed by some specific gravity of the social system to be holding their places at those lower