new stamp-album, he wanted it hard,
and he said so. I shall not go so far as to say that he hectored his
parents into sending him to our school. They were probably feeling, on
their own account, that they had come to town for better things than
they had been getting; and likely enough they met his demands halfway.
There was usually a certain element of cheeriness in his nagging; but
the cheeriness was quite secondary to the insistence.

"Oh, come, mother!" or, "Oh, father, now!" was commonly Johnny's opening
formula, employed with a smile, wheedling or protesting, as the occasion
seemed to require.

And, "Oh, well...!" was commonly the opening formula for the
response--meaning, in completed form, "Well, if we must, we must."

However, his parents were probably ready to meet with an open mind the
scorings of their young, sole critic, thinking that his urgency might
advance themselves no less than him. Well, in the autumn Johnny turned
up at the Academy with an equipment that included everything approved
and needed; and he was not long in letting us know that his father was
manager in the supply-yard of a large firm of contractors and builders.
His father had spent his earlier married years, it transpired, about the
grounds of a small-town "depot," and knew a good deal in regard to
lumber and cement.

To most of us fathers were fathers and businesses were
businesses--things to be accepted without comment or criticism. Our own
youthfulness, and the social tone of the day and region, discouraged
either. If I thought anything about it, I must have thought, as I think
still, that it was a manly and satisfying matter to come to grips with
the serviceable actualities of the building trades. Construction, in its
various phases, still seems to me a more useful and more tonic concern
than brokerage, for example, and similar forms of office life.

Johnny soon suggested that I go with him, some Saturday afternoon, to
the "yard." I asked Raymond to join us. Raymond had just come on Gothic
architecture and was studying its historical phases. He was picking up
points about the English cathedrals and was making drawings to
illustrate the development of buttresses and of window tracery. The yard
was only a mile and a half away and the three of us frolicked loosely
along the streets until we got there. Johnny's father was going about
the place in an admirable pair of new blue overalls, and carried a
thick, blunt pencil behind one ea