r. He showed an independent, breezy
manner that had not been very marked before. He was loud and clear and
authoritative, and kept a dozen or more stout fellows pretty busy. Once
an elderly man in a high silk hat passed through the yard on his way to
its little office. He stopped, and he and Johnny's father had some talk
together. "Yes, sir!" said Johnny's father, with considerable emphasis
and momentum. I enjoyed his "Yes, sir!" It was pleasant to find him so
hearty and so well-mannered. He seemed to have escaped from something
and to be glad of it. The man in the high hat hardly tried to stand up
against him. As he turned away he smiled in a curious fashion; and I
thought I heard him say to himself, as he moved back toward the door of
the shed that had the sign "Office" on it: "I wonder whether I'm going
to run him, or whether he's going to run me?"

Johnny was all eyes for a tall stack of lathing in bundles and for a
pile of sacks filled with hair from cows' hides, which last was to go
into plaster. Raymond looked at these objects of interest--and at
several others--with some degree of abstractedness. The English
cathedrals, as I was told later, had not been plastered. Raymond had
already developed some faculty for entertaining a concept freed from
clogging and qualifying detail; and this faculty grew as he grew. He
liked his ideal _net_; facts, practical facts, never had much charm for
him. I remember his once saying, when about twenty-three, that he should
have liked to be an architect, but that plumbing and speaking-tubes had
turned him away. If he could have drawn facades and stopped there, I
think he might have been quite happy and successful in the profession.

Johnny pulled a lath for each of us out of one of the bundles, and we
used them in our tour of the yard as alpenstocks. We found a glacier in
the shape of a mortar bed and were using the laths to sound its depths,
when Johnny's father appeared from round the corner of a lumber pile. He
clapped his hands with a loud report.

"Here! that won't do!" he said; and none of us thought it remotely
possible to withstand him. "Enough for one morning," he added, and he
waved both arms with a broad scoop to motion us toward the street gate.

"Oh, father, now!" began Johnny (with no smile at all), conscious of his
position as host.

"No more, to-day," said his father. "School six days a week would be
about my idea."

Raymond said nothing, but drew up his mouth