Together their eyes watched shades dance on sunny slopes, cloud shadows race among the hills or lie lazily in the valley below.
"Exuberant Nature and ebullient boy loved each other from the first.
Alone, enravished, he often wandered far in sheer joy of living.

He brings, one day, from his rambles a bunch of immortelles which mother graciously receives.

Twenty years later the boy, man-grown, bows reverently over a box of withered flowers--the same bouquet the mother took that day and laid away as a precious memento of his boyish love.
Such was the first decade.
"A ten-year-old boy, motherless, steals from harsh labor and yet harsher surroundings, runs to the home of sacred memories, clambers to the attic, and spends the night in anguished solitude.

This was his first Gethsemane.

For ten years buffeted and beaten, battling with adversity, sometimes losing but never lost, snatching learning here and there, hating sham, loving passionately, misunderstood, misapprehended, too stubbornly proud to ask apologies or make useless explanations, fighting poverty in the depths of privation, wrestling existence from toil he loathed, befriending many and also befriended much, but always face to face with the grim tragedy which has held part of the stage since Eden.
"Such was the second decade.