The changes of time are hard to realize.

One knows, of course, that the old man once was young.

One understands that the tree once was a sapling, and conversely we know that the child will be a man and the gaunt sapling stuck in the earth in time will become a great spreading tree.

But the miracle of growth passes not merely our understanding, but our imagination.
So though men tell us, and grow black in the face with the vehemence of telling, that the Sycamore Ridge of the sixties--a gray smudge of unpainted wooden houses bordering the Santa Fe trail, with the street merging into the sunflowers a block either way from the pump,--is the town that now lies hidden in the elm forest, with its thirty miles of paving and its scores of acres of wide velvet lawns, with its parks wherein fountains play, guarded by cannon discarded by the pride of modern war, with the court-house on the brink of the hill that once was far west of the town and with twenty-two thousand people whizzing around in trolleys, rattling about in buggies or scooting down the shady avenues in motor-cars--whatever the records may show, the real truth we know; the towns are not the same; the miracle of growth cannot fool us.

And yet here is the miracle in the making.