hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem
about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:--

"O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones."

So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a
maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were
not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with
a long list of words under it rhyming with "stones," she would have
forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and
the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone
walls of the mills, and of the word "Barclay" on the long low walls of
the factory, might have passed from her consciousness altogether. By
such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once
formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what
we are, and what we are has grown from what we were. If Jeanette
Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties,
was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,--so far as
mere money goes,--had been brought up with a governess and a maid,
and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly
kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought
up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to
teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should
know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women
about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have
lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry--But there we
go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all;
and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham aprons, sitting on a
cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the bass play among
the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree,
has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be
hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.

But the recollection of those days, so vivid and so sweet, is one of
her choicest treasures. Of course things were not as she saw them.
Jake Dolan was only in his forties then, and considered himself a
young man. But the child remembers him as a tall, brown-eyed man whom
she saw on state occasions in his faded blue army clothes, and to her
he has always been the picture of a veteran. Some one must have told
her--though