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for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece,
"trippingly on the tongue," they harkened back over his ancestry to find
the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a
nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect
and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When
he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership
that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant's odd mania to take up
the cause of the weak--often foolish causes that revealed a kind of
fanatic chivalry in him--Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed
knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.

Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the
child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity
for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a
commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also--the very facts that
were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and
Amos that their son was setting out on his journey from the heart of his
childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands,
broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation
wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child's quick wit and merry
heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so
completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could
not see that his leadership in school came from the fact that a man was
rising in him--the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant
as destiny itself. They could not see the man's body; they saw only the
child's heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor
could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that
matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to
announce that he had been elected President of the senior class in the
Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at
commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed
found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands,
home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half
ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for
glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her
attention--great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant-