No one can associate with wise and witty and gallant people, even in books, without showing the effects of it. Some of their wisdom and wit and gallantry, be it never so little, passes to the reader; he learns to look at the world and the people in it with more discerning eyes; life gains a larger meaning; it becomes more full of colour and interest. The result, in the end, is what, for want of a better word, we call culture; a word meaning originally the tilling and cultivating of the ground, and afterwards coming to be applied to the tilling and cultivating of the mind. Its most valuable result is the acquirement of what we call taste--another clumsy word and inexpressive, by which we mean the power to discern and to enjoy the right things--good literature, good music, good pictures--and to know and to reject the wrong things. It was this faculty which Allan was gradually acquiring--so slowly and subtly that the change was not perceptible from day to day--scarcely from month to month. But at the end of a year, he was quite a different boy; he had grown mentally and physically; he was getting more out of life; he was beginning to understand the people about him; he could distinguish the gold from the dross, the true from the sham; and the more this power grew, the more did his respect and love and admiration grow for the humble friends among whom his lot was cast. They were genuine and true, speaking from the heart, happy without envy, honest and kind, ready to excuse and to forget another's fault and to reach out a helping hand to any one who needed it. He began to see, dimly and imperfectly, that the great, warm heart of America beats, not in the mansions of the rich, but in the humble and unpretentious homes scattered up and down this great land of ours, each sheltering a little family, living its own life, struggling toward its own ideals, and contributing its own mite to the world's happiness and progress. * * * * * Nearly a year had passed; a year of which every day had brought its pleasures and its duties. Allan had become one of the best operators on the road; the difficult business of the position at Byers Junction he handled easily and without confusion. He had gained confidence in himself. The trainmen liked him, for they found him ever willing and helpful; they respected him, too, for his decisions were prompt and intelligent and always just. The dispatchers knew they could rely on him, and the business of the junction was left more and more under his control. In fact, he came to be himself a sort of dispatcher over those eight miles of track between his office and West Junction.