tead of an employee. Old girl, we're on our way up the ladder and
nothing but old Grim, himself, can stop us. And when I came in from the
old farm, when I was twelve years old, I had only my two hands and the
clothes I stood in."

"You've been wonderful!" murmured Mrs. Moore. "Do you know, Mr. Wolf has
done well too. His wife said he couldn't speak a word of English when he
came to this country--at just twelve, too, and now he's manager of the
Grand Dry Goods Company."

"He's a nice fellow with a mighty pretty wife."

It was Mrs. Moore's turn to grunt, which she did, in the manner of a
wifely sniff. And the two sat in silence, hands clasped in the lovely
summer night.

After all, Roger did not get beyond a first attempt at the railroad
building. He began the tunnel the next day, he and the two little Wolfs
digging vigorously until a hole as large as a bath tub was completed.
While resting from this toil, Roger conceived the idea of making a
wading pool, with the aid of the hose. Some vague lesson won from
previous experience made him ask permission of his mother and this
given, the three children spent an ecstatic, though muddy, day in the
improvised pond.

Roger's father suggested that evening that the pool be gradually
enlarged to make a swimming pool. He enlisted Mr. Wolf's aid for the
summer evenings and in a couple of weeks a very creditable pool, brick
and concrete lined, made a summer heaven of the back yard for the little
friends.

It was the pool that made this summer perhaps the most memorable one of
Roger's childhood. It was the one, anyway, to which in after years his
mind harked back with the most pleasure and with the greatest frequency.

Even little Charley learned to swim. Roger never was to forget her
slender beauty, as she stood ready for her dive on the pool edge. This
was his last memory of the little girl, for the Prebles gave up farming
that fall and moved away. Somebody said that Mr. Preble drank up his
farm, which at the time seemed mere nonsense to Roger.

Roger's tenth summer was memorable too. But he ceased to think of
himself as a child then, because that was the summer his mother had
typhoid fever and all summer long he was practically his own man. His
father could give him no time, for there was a strike in the factory
that lasted during the six weeks that Mrs. Moore was the sickest. The
night that his mother was passing through her crisis, men threw stones
in the kitchen windows.