two. Days come and
go, moons wax and wane, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and
winter glide fourfold through their appointed seasons, before the two
young men stand side by side on a common level again. And the events
of these changing seasons ring in so rapidly, and in so inevitable a
fashion, that the whole cycle runs like a real story along the page.

STRIFE

_With the first faint note out of distance flung,
From the moment man hears the siren call
Of Victory's bugle, which sounds for all,
To his inner self the promise is made
To weary not, rest not, but all unafraid
Press on--till for him the paean be sung.

The song for the victor is sweet, is sweet--
Yet to the music a memory clings
Of trampled nestlings, of broken wings,
And of faces white with defeat!_
--ELIZABETH D. PRESTON

CHAPTER I. "DEAN FUNNYBONE"

_Nature they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:
For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
.............................
With stuff untainted,
shaped a hero new_.--LOWELL

DR. LLOYD FENNEBEN, Dean of Sunrise College, had migrated to the Walnut
Valley with the founding of the school here. In fact, he had brought the
college with him when he came hither, and had set it, as a light not to
be hidden, on the crest of that high ridge that runs east of the little
town of Lagonda Ledge. And the town eagerly took the new school to
itself; at once its pride and profit. Yea, the town rises and sets with
Sunrise. When the first gleam of morning, hidden by the east ridge from
the Walnut Valley, glints redly from the south windows of the college
dome in the winter time, and from the north windows in the summer time,
the town bestirs; itself, and the factory whistles blow. And when the
last crimson glory of evening puts a halo of flame about the brow of
Sunrise, the people know that out beyond the Walnut River the day is
passing, and the pearl-gray mantle of twilight is deepening to velvety
darkness on the wide, quiet prairie lands.

Lagonda Ledge was a better place after the college settled permanently
above it. Some improvident citizens took a new hold on life, while some
undesirables who had lived in lawless infamy skulked across the Walnut
and disappeared in that rough picturesque region full of uncertainties
that lies behind the west bluffs of t