tion and
workmanship caught the boy's imagination.

"That's what I'll do," he said aloud. "I'll build steel buildings like
this. In college, that's what I'll study, reinforced concrete building.
I've got to find a profession that'll give me a bigger chance than poor
Dad had, so I can marry young and have lots and gob-lots of kids."

The wind increased and Jim slid off the coil of rope and lay flat on his
back, looking up at the sky. It was full of stars and scudding clouds.
Jim missed the sky in New York. He lay staring, sailing with the clouds
while his boyish heart glowed with the stars.

"I'm not in New York," he thought. "I'm--I'm out in the desert country.
There isn't any noise. There aren't any people. I'm an engineer and I'm
building a bridge across a canyon where no one but the birds have ever
crossed before. I'm making a place for people to come after me. I'm
discovering new land for them and fixing it so they can come."

For half an hour Jim lay and dreamed. He often had wondered what he was
going to be as a man. He had planned to be many things, from a milkman
to an Indian fighter. But since his father's death and indeed for some
time before, his mind had taken a bent suggested by Mr. Manning's
melancholy. What was the matter with Exham and the Mannings? Why had his
father failed? What could he do to make up for the failure? These
thoughts had colored the boy's dreams. No one can measure the importance
to a child of taking his air castles away from him. Tragedy scars a
child permanently. Grown people often forget a heavy loss.

But tonight, inspired by the wonder of the building and the heavens,
Jim's mind slipped its leashings and took its racial bent. Suddenly he
was a maker of trails, a builder in the wilderness. He completed the
bridge and then sat up with an articulate, "Gee whiz! I know what I'm
going to be!"

It seemed a matter of tremendous importance to the boy. He sat with
clenched fists and burning cheeks, sensing for the first time one of the
highest types of joy that comes to human beings, that of finding one's
predilection in the work by which one earns one's daily bread. The sense
of clean-cut aim to his life was like balm and tonic to the boy's
nerves. Something deeper than a New York or a New England influence was
speaking in Jim now. For the first time, his Anglo-Saxon race, his race
of empire builders, was finding its voice in him.

Jim rode gaily down the tile elevator, his flashing