of our twenties is lasting.

It was into this gilded world that Grant Adams was born. Suckled behind
the press, cradled in the waste basket, toddling under hurrying feet,
Grant's earliest memories were of work--work and working lovers, and
their gay talk as they worked wove strange fancies in his little mind.

It was in those days that Amos Adams and his wife, considering the
mystery of death, tried to peer behind the veil. For Amos tables tipped,
slates wrote, philosophers, statesmen and conquerors flocked in with
grotesque advice, and all those curious phenomena that come from the
activities of the abnormal mind, appeared and astounded the visionaries
as they went about their daily work. The boy Grant used to sit, a
wide-eyed, freckled, sun-browned little creature, running his skinny
little hands through his red hair, and wondering about the unsolvable
problems of life and death.

But soon the problems of a material world came in upon Grant as the
child became a boy: problems of the wood and field, problems of the
constantly growing herd at play in water, in snow, on the ice and in the
prairie; and then came the more serious problems of the wood box, the
stable and farm. Thus he grew strong of limb, quick of hand, firm of
foot and sure of mind. And someway as he grew from childhood into
boyhood, getting hold of his faculties--finding himself physically, so
Harvey seemed to grow with him. All over the town where men needed money
Daniel Sands's mortgages were fastened--not heavily (nothing was heavy
in that day of the town's glorious youth) but surely. Dr. Nesbit's gay
ruthless politics, John Kollander's patriotism, leading always to the
court house and its emoluments, Captain Morton's inventions that never
materialized, the ever coming sunrise of the Adams--all these things
became definitely a part of the changeless universe of Harvey as Grant's
growing faculties became part of his consciousness.

And here is a mystery: the formation of the social crystal. In that
crystal the outer facets and the inner fell into shape--the Nesbits, the
Kollanders, the Adamses, the Calvins, the Mortons, and the Sandses,
falling into one group; and the Williamses, the Hogans, the Bowmans, the
McPhersons, the Dooleys and Casper Herdicker falling into another group.
The hill separated from the valley. The separation was not a matter of
moral sense; for John Kollander and Dan Sands and Joseph Calvin touched
zero in moral intelligence; a