weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to
become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the
failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.

There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who
classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to
tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials
themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an
ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called
intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no
better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from
the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is
Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured,
to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase
it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their
veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as
much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who
sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or
on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.

Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains
admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was
another day.

In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often
problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of
youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to
engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination. They told the boy
that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the
myriad stars. He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the
Edge. No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the
figures be conclusive. They told him of the positive and negative
poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres
of force. Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told
him--men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told
him--that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was
Love. He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world
indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since
ever time began. But it seemed to him that this union must never be
that of mere chance. There could be but one way right and fit for the
meeting of the two h