As the years went by, Jeanette came to remember her playmate as her dream child, and once when she was a young miss of eighteen, and something in her hurt to be said, she tried to make a little poem about her dream-child playmate, but all she ever got was:-- "O eyes, so brown and clear like water sparkling over mossy stones." So she gave it up and wrote a poem about a prince who carried away a maiden, and then she tore up the prince and the maiden, and if it were not for that line about the eyes in the back of her trigonometry, with a long list of words under it rhyming with "stones," she would have forgotten about her playfellow, and much of the memory of the dam and the pride she took as a child in the great letters upon the high stone walls of the mills, and of the word "Barclay" on the long low walls of the factory, might have passed from her consciousness altogether.

By such frail links does memory bind us to our past; and yet, once formed, how like steel they hold us! What we will be, grows from what we are, and what we are has grown from what we were.

If Jeanette Barclay, the only child of a man who, when she was in her twenties, was to be one of the hundred richest men in his country,--so far as mere money goes,--had been brought up with a governess and a maid, and with frills and furbelows and tucks and Heaven knows what of silly kinks and fluffy stuff in her childish head, instead of being brought up in the Sycamore Ridge public schools, with Grandmother Barclay to teach her the things that a little girl in the fourth reader should know, and with a whole community of honest, hard-working men and women about her to teach her what life really is, indeed she would have lived a different life, and when she was ready to marry--But there we go looking in the back of the book again, and that will not do at all; and besides, a little blue-eyed girl in gingham aprons, sitting on a cool stone with moss on its north side, watching the bass play among the rocks in a clear, deep, sun-mottled pool under a great elm tree, has a right to the illusions of her childhood and should not be hustled into long dresses and love affairs until her time has come.
But the recollection of those days, so vivid and so sweet, is one of her choicest treasures.

Of course things were not as she saw them.
Jake Dolan was only in his forties then, and considered himself a young man.

But the child remembers him as a tall, brown-eyed man whom she saw on state occasions in his faded blue army clothes, and to her he has always been the picture of a veteran.