ll. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships
in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from
Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience
of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I
write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office
through the golden haze of later events.

It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her
father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never
knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads
during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always
looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the
spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.

Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper:
"John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha
Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."

Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events,
just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and
of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep
way--for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the
ideal--these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce
pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she
admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she
loved with all the devotion of her young soul.

He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every
one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life
well--all of it--and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by
evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against
goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his
loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big
things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country
newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.

"What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead
compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.

He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his
newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion
squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was
of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in sett