e committee, and then a long line
of vice-presidents and assistant secretaries and treasurers and
monitors was elected by the society.

So John became the social leader of the group of boys and girls who
were just coming out of kissing games into dances at one another's
homes in the town. John decided who should be in the "crowd" and who
might be invited only when a mixed crowd was expected. Fathers
desiring trade, and mothers faithful to church ties, protested; but
John Barclay had his way. It was his crowd. They called themselves the
"Spring Chickens," and as John had money saved to spend as he pleased,
he dictated many things; but he did not spend his money, he lent it,
and his barn was stored with, skates and sleds and broken guns and
scrap-iron held as security, while his pockets bulged with knives
taken as interest.

As the winter waned and the Spring Chickens waxed fat in social
honours, Bob Hendricks glanced up from his algebra one day, and
discovered that little Molly Culpepper had two red lips and two
pig-tail braids of hair that reached below her waist. Then and there
he shot her deftly with a paper wad, chewed and fired through a cane
pipe-stem, and waited till she wiped it off her cheek with her apron
and made a face at him, before he plunged into the mysteries of _x_2 +
2_xy_ + _y_2. And thus another old story began, as new and as fresh as
when Adam and Eve walked together in the garden.

John Barclay was so busy during his last year in the Sycamore Ridge
school that he often fancied afterwards that the houses on Lincoln
Avenue in Culpepper addition must have come with the grass in the
spring, for he has no memory of their building. Neither does he
remember when General Madison Hendricks built the brick building on
the corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, in which he opened the
Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge. Yet John remembered that his
team and wagon were going all winter, hauling stone for the foundation
of the Hendricks home on the hill--a great brick structure, with
square towers and square "ells" rambling off on the prairie, and
square turrets with ornate cornice pikes pricking the sky. For years
the two big houses standing side by side--the Hendricks house and the
Culpepper house, with its tall white pillars reaching to the roof, its
double door and its two white wings spreading over the wide green
lawn--were the show places of Sycamore Ridge, and the town was always
divided in its