end, and the joy of this
earliest mating season will be bottled up and stored for a later
maturity. God is wise and good. Doubtless some new and better thing will
take the place of this first moving of the waters of life in the heart;
but for us of the older generation that is beginning to fade, we are
glad that untaught and innocent, our lips tasted from that spring when
in the heart was no knowledge of the poison that might come with the
draft.

A tall, shy, vivid girl, but above everything else, friendly, was Laura
Nesbit in her middle teens; and though Grant in later years remembered
her as having wonderful gray eyes, the elder town of Harvey for the most
part recollects her only as a gay and kindly spirit looking out into the
world through a happy, inquiring face. But the elder town could not in
the nature of things know Laura Nesbit as the children knew her. For the
democracy of childhood has its own estimates of its own citizens and the
children of Harvey--the Dooleys and the Williamses and the Bowmans as
well as the Calvins, the Mortons, the Sandses and the Kollanders,
remember Laura Nesbit for something more than her rather gawky body. To
the children, she was a bright soul. They remember--and the Bowmans
better than any one else--that Laura Nesbit shared what she had with
every one. She never ate a whole stick of candy in her life. From her
school lunch-basket, the Dooleys had their first oranges and the
Williamses their first bananas. Apples for the Bowmans and maple
sugar--a rare delicacy on the prairies in those days--for every one came
from her wonderful basket. And though her mother kept Laura in white
aprons when the other girls were in ginghams and in little red and black
woolen, though the child's wonderful yellow hair, soft and wavy like her
father's plumey roach, was curled with great care and much pride, it was
her mother's pride--the grim Satterthwaite demand for caste in any
democracy. But even with those caste distinctions there was the face
that smiled, the lips that trembled in sympathy, the heart that felt the
truth.

"Jim," quoth the mother on a day when the yard was full of Dooleys and
Bowmans and Calvins--Calvins, whom Mrs. Nesbit regarded as inferior even
to the Dooleys because of the vast Calvin pretense--"Jim, Laura has
inherited that common Indiana streak of yours. I can't make her a
Satterthwaite--she's Indiana to the bone. Why, when I go to town with
her, every drayman and ditch di