THE TURNING OF THE ROAD At the close of the war Captain Edward Franklin returned to a shrunken world.

The little Illinois village which had been his home no longer served to bound his ambitions, but offered only a mill-round of duties so petty, a horizon of opportunities so restricted, as to cause in his mind a feeling of distress equivalent at times to absolute abhorrence.
The perspective of all things had changed.

The men who had once seemed great to him in this little world now appeared in the light of a wider judgment, as they really were--small, boastful, pompous, cowardly, deceitful, pretentious.

Franklin was himself now a man, and a man graduated from that severe and exacting school which so quickly matured a generation of American youth.

Tall, finely built, well set up, with the self-respecting carriage of the soldier and the direct eye of the gentleman, there was a swing in his step not commonly to be found behind a counter, and somewhat in the look of his grave face which caused men to listen when he spoke.