een a victorious general, and Kilo a captured city of great
importance, he would have had a similar feeling. Already he felt that,
if he was not the captor of the town, he was one of its important
citizens, and practically the husband of an attractive woman whose
father owned sufficient property to be one of those who grumble about
taxes.

To a man who had been a wanderer all his life it was pleasant to feel
that he was soon to be kin to all the things he saw on Main Street,
brother to the town-pump and cousin to the flag pole, and to consider
that even the well-gnawed hitching rails were to be part of his future
years. He nodded across the street to Billings, the grocer and general
store man, as if he was an old acquaintance, and he watched Skinner, the
butcher, sweeping the walk, with a pleasant smile, for he saw in him a
future friend. He loved Kilo, and he was ready to like everything, from
the post office to the creamery. His whole future seemed destined to be
simple and pleasant, for he was resolved to do his best to make the town
like him, and there seemed little opportunity for complications in a
town that could all be seen at one glance.

Strangers think all small towns simple. The few stores are all plainly
labeled, the streets run at right angles, and the houses are set well
apart, like big letters in a primer. A small town looks like a story
without a plot, like: "See the cat. Does the can see me? The cat sees
the dog;" beside which a city is as unfathomable as a Henry James
paragraph. To the stranger each man and woman he meets is a complete
individual, each standing alone, like letters on an alphabet block, and
not easily to be confused, one with the other. But these letters of the
small town's alphabet are often tangled into as long and complex words
as those of the greatest city; it takes but twenty-six letters to spell
all the passions. The letter A, that looked so distinctly separate, is
soon found to be connected with C and T in Cat, and with W and R in War,
as well as cross-connected with the C and W in Caw, and with T and R in
Tar; while the houses that stood so seemingly alone are all connected
and criss-crossed by lines of love and hate, of petty policy and revenge
and pride, quite as are nations or people who live in labyrinths, or in
a metropolis.

It was still too early in the morning for Eliph' Hewlitt to call on Miss
Sally, and there was no haste; the day was long. He even doubted whether