ith a serene sense of a
duty well done, and meet and feast upon the eyes of Mary, his wife,
keen, hungry eyes, filled with more or less sinful pride in his
strength.

No defeat that ever came to Amos Adams, and because he was born out of
his time, defeat was his common portion, and no contumely ever was his
in a time when men scorned the evidence of things not seen, no failure,
no apparent weakness in her husband's nature, ever put a tremor in her
faith in him. For she knew his heart. She could hear his armor clank and
see it shine; she could feel the force and the precision of his lance
when all the world of Harvey saw only a dreamer in rusty clothes,
fumbling with some stupid and ponderous folly that the world did not
understand. The printing office that Mary and Amos thought so grand was
really a little pine shack, set on wooden piers on a side street. Inside
in the single room, with the rough-coated walls above the press and
type-cases covered with inky old sale bills, and specimens of the
_Tribune's_ printing--inside the office which seemed to Mary and
Amos the palace of a race of giants, others saw only a shabby, inky,
little room, with an old fashioned press and a jobber among the type
racks in the gloom to the rear. Through the front window that looked
into a street filled with loads of hay and wood, and with broken wagons,
and scrap iron from a wheelwright's shop, Amos Adams looked for the
everlasting sunrise, and Mary saw it always in his face.

But this is idling; it is not getting on with the Book. A score of men
and women are crowding up to these pages waiting to get into the story.
And the town of Harvey, how it is bursting its bounds, how it is
sprawling out over the white paper, tumbling its new stores and houses
and gas mains and water pipes all over the table; with what a clatter
and clamor and with what vain pride! Now the pride of those years in
Harvey came with the railroad, and here, pulling at the paper, stands
big George Brotherton with his ten stone heart. He has been sputtering
and nagging for a dozen pages to swing off the front platform of the
first passenger car that came to town. He was a fat, overgrown youth in
his late teens, but he wore the uniform of a train newsboy, and any
uniform is a uniform. His laugh was like the crash of worlds--and it is
to-day after thirty years. When the road pushed on westward Brotherton
remained in Harvey and even though the railroad roundhouse employed fiv