s ever in the air.
Boys learn to swim like otters and skate like Hollanders, and their
sisters emulate them in the skating, though not so much in the swimming
as they should. There is a life full of great swing. The touch
between the town and country is exceedingly close, and the country
family which comes to the community blends swiftly with the current.
So with the family of Grant Harlson and so with him personally. A year
made him collared and cravatted, short-cropped of hair, mighty in
high-school frays, and with a new ambition stirring him, of a quality
to compare with that of one Lucifer of unbounded reputation and
doubtful biography. There was something beyond all shooting and riding
and wrestling fame and the breath of growing things. There was another
world with reachable prizes and much to feed upon. He must wear
medals, metaphorically, and eat his fill, in time.

The high-school is really the first telescope through which a boy so
born and bred looks fairly out upon this planet. The astronomer who
instructs him is often of just the sort for the labor, a being also
climbing, one not to be a high-school principal forever, but using this
occupation merely as a stepping-stone upon his ascending journey. If
he be conscientious, he instils, together with his information that all
Gaul is divided and that a parasang is not something to eat, also the
belief that the game sought is worth the candle, and that hard study is
not wasted time. Such a teacher found young Harlson; such a teacher
was Professor--they always call the high-school principal "Professor"
in small towns--Morgan, and he took an interest in the youth, not the
interest of the typical great educator, but rather that of an older and
aspiring jockey aiding a younger one with his first mount, or of a
railroad engineer who tells his fireman of a locomotive's moods and
teaches him the tricks of management. They might help each other some
day. Well equipped, too, was Morgan for the service. No shallow
graduate of some mere diploma-manufactory, but one who believed in the
perfection of means for an end,--an advocate of thoroughness.

So it came that for four years Grant Harlson studied
feverishly,--selfishly might be almost the word,--such was the impulse
that moved him under Morgan's teaching, and so purely objective all his
reasoning. In his vacations he hunted, fished, and developed the more
thews and sinews, and acquired new fancies as to whet