up above the top rail the
white crest of the dogwood slowly nodded in the breeze this sweet summer
day. In the clover the bumblebees, the crickets, and the grasshoppers
boomed, chirped, crackled, shouting their joy to be alive in so good a
place and on so good a day. Above, the sky was blue, pure blue, and
all the bluer for the specks of cloud that hung, still-poised like
white-winged birds, white against the blue. Last evening's rain had
washed the world clean. The sky, the air, the flowers, the clover, red
and white, the kindly grass that ran green everywhere under foot, the
dusty road, all were washed clean. In the elm bunches by the fence, in
the maples and thorns, the birds, their summer preoccupations forgotten
at the bidding of this new washed day, recalled their spring songs and
poured them forth with fine careless courage.

In tune to this brave symphony of colour and song, and down this
flower-prinked, song-filled, clean washed, grassy lane stepped Dick this
summer morning, stepped with the spring and balance of the well-trained
athlete, stepped with the step of a man whose heart makes him merry
music. A clean-looking man was Dick, harmonious with the day and with
the lane down which he stepped. Against the grey of his suit his
hands, his face, and his neck, where the negligee shirt fell away wide,
revealing his strong, full curves spreading to the shoulders, all showed
ruddy brown. He was a man good to look upon, with his springy step, his
tan skin, his clear eye, but chiefly because out of his clear eye a
soul looked forth clean and unafraid upon God's good world of wholesome
growing things.

From his three years of 'varsity life he came back unspoiled to his
boyhood's love of the open sky and of all things under it. He had just
come through a great year in college, his third, the greatest in many
ways of the college course. His class had thrust him into a man's place
of leadership in that world where only manhood counts, and he had "made
good." In the literary, in the gym, on the campus he had made and held
high place, and on the class lists, in spite of his many distractions,
he had ranked a double first. Best of all, it filled him with warm
gratitude to remember that none of his fellows had grudged him any of
his good things. What a decent lot they were! It humbled him to think of
their pride in him. He would not disappoint them. Noblesse oblige.

At the crest of the hill he paused to look back, and he