And thus another old story began, as new and as fresh as when Adam and Eve walked together in the garden.
John Barclay was so busy during his last year in the Sycamore Ridge school that he often fancied afterwards that the houses on Lincoln Avenue in Culpepper addition must have come with the grass in the spring, for he has no memory of their building.

Neither does he remember when General Madison Hendricks built the brick building on the corner of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, in which he opened the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge.

Yet John remembered that his team and wagon were going all winter, hauling stone for the foundation of the Hendricks home on the hill--a great brick structure, with square towers and square "ells" rambling off on the prairie, and square turrets with ornate cornice pikes pricking the sky.

For years the two big houses standing side by side--the Hendricks house and the Culpepper house, with its tall white pillars reaching to the roof, its double door and its two white wings spreading over the wide green lawn--were the show places of Sycamore Ridge, and the town was always divided in its admiration for them.

John's heart was sadly torn between them.