ever knew exactly how the
celestial guests were to be robed and harped; while the Joe Calvins of
proud Elm Street, opulent in an eight room house, with the town's one
bath tub, scowled at the angels who kept on coming nevertheless--for
such is the careless and often captious way of angels that come to the
world in the doctor's black bag--kept on coming to the frowning house of
Calvin as frequently and as idly as they came to the gay Bowmans.
Looking back on those days a generation later, it would seem as if the
whole town were a wilderness of babies. They came on the hill in Elm
Street, a star-eyed baby named Ann even came to the Daniel Sandses, and
a third baby to the Ezra Mortons and another to the Kollanders (which
gave Rhoda an excuse for forming a lifelong habit of making John serve
her breakfast in bed to the scorn of Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Herdicker who
for thirty years sniffed audibly about Rhoda's amiable laziness) and the
John Dexters had one that came and went in the night. But down by the
river--there they came in flocks. The Dooleys, the McPhersons, the
Williamses and the hordes of unidentified men and women who came to saw
boards, mix mortar, make bricks and dig--to them the kingdom of Heaven
was very near, for they suffered little children and forbade them not.
And also, because the kingdom was so near--so near even to homes without
sewers, homes where dirt and cold and often hunger came--the children
were prone to hurry back to the Kingdom discouraged with their little
earthly pilgrimages. For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and
drawn water in the town's first days seemed by some specific gravity of
the social system to be holding their places at those lower
levels--always reaching vainly and eagerly, but always reaching a little
higher and a little further from them for that equality of opportunity
which seemed to lie about them that first day when the town was born.

In the upper reaches of the town Henry Fenn's bibulous habits became
accepted matters to a wider and wider circle and Tom Van Dorn still had
his way with the girls while the town grinned at the two young men in
gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn,
cryptic messages for the young men--from Tom's mother and Henry's
father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages
with incidental admonitions of his own--kind, gentle and gorgeously
ineffective. Then he would return to his office w