No more would he feel the soft run of new grass beneath his soles, or longer need beware the chance nail or sharp stone in the way.  On the morrow, presumably to be a day inviting to bare feet as had all the other days of his summers, remembered and forgotten, he would, when he rose, put on stockings and stout shoes; and he would put them on world without end through all the new mornings of his life, howsoever urgently with their clement airs they might solicit the older mode.  It was a solemn thing to reflect upon, under a glittering heaven that held, or not, those who might feel with him the bigness of the moment.  He suffered a vision of the new shoes, stiffly formidable, side by side at the foot of his bed in the little house.  It left him feeling all his years.

And he would wear long trousers!  With tolerant amusement he saw himself as of old, barefoot, bare-legged, the knee pants buttoned to the calico blouse.  It was all over.  He scanned the stars a last time, dimly feeling that the least curious of their inhabitants would be aware of this crisis.

Perhaps on one of those blinking orbs people with a proper concern for other world events would be saying to one another:  “Yes, he’s grown up now.  Didn’t you hear the big news?  Why, to-morrow he’s going to begin driving a truck for Trimble Cushman—­got a job for the whole summer.”

If the announcement startled less than great news should, the speaker could surely produce a sensation by adding:  “The first automobile truck in Newbern Center.”

And how had this immature being, capable out-of-doors boy though he was, come to be so exalted above his fellows?  Sam Pickering’s linotype had first revealed his gift for machinery.  For Sam had installed a linotype, and Wilbur Cowan had patiently mastered its distracting intricacies.  Dave Cowan had informally reappeared one day, still attired with decreasing elegance below the waist—­his cloth-topped shoes but little more than distressing memories—­and announced that he was now an able operator of this wondrous machine; and the harried editor of the Advance, stung to enterprise by flitting wastrels who tarried at his case only long enough to learn the name of the next town, had sought relief in machinery, even if it did take bread from the mouths of honest typesetters.  Their lack of preference as to where they earned there bread, their insouciant flights from town to town without notice, had made Sam brutal.  He had ceased to care whether they had bread or not.  So Dave for a summer had brought him surcease from help worries.

The cynical journeyman printer of the moment, on a day when Dave tried out the new machine, had stood by and said she might set type but she certainly couldn’t justify it, because it took a human to do that, and how would a paper look with unevenly ending lines?  When Dave, seated before the thing, proved that she uncannily could justify the lines of type before casting them in metal, the dismayed printer had shuddered at the mystery of it.