J.W., Jr., thought of Phil’s words.  “Sure enough,” he responded, “tracing things back makes a lot of difference.  I’ve been going over what Phil Khamis said at the Morning Watch—­you remember?  How everything he has to-day has come to him by the goodness of Christian people.  At first I thought that was no more than a description of his particular case, because I knew how true it was.  But when you begin to trace things back, as you say, what’s true about Phil is true about all of us—­anyway, about me.”

“How is that, son?” Mrs. Farwell asked gently.

“Well, I mean,” J.W. smilingly answered her, though flushing a little too, “the Institute, that seemed to me something new and different, is really tied up to what you folks and the whole church have been doing for me as far back as I can remember.”

And so they talked, parents and pastor and J.W., quite naturally and freely, of the long chain of interest which had linked his life to the church’s life, back through all the years to his babyhood.

J.W. had been in the League only a year or two, but it seemed to him that he had been in the church always.  And the memories of his boyhood which had the church for center, were intimately interwoven with all his other experiences.

As his father said, “I guess, pastor, if you tried to take out of J.W.’s young life all that the church has meant to him, it would puzzle a professor to explain whatever might be left.”

J.W. had been born in the country, on a farm whose every tree and fence corner he still loved.  His first recollections of the church as part of his life had to do with the Sunday morning drive to the little meetinghouse, which stood where the road to town skirted a low hill.  It had horse-sheds on one side, stretching back to the rear of the church lot, and some sizeable elms and maples were grouped about its front and sides.  It was a one-room structure, unless you counted the space curtained off for the primary class, as J.W. always did.  For back of this curtain’s protecting folds he had begun his career as a Sunday school pupil and had made his first friends.  At that time even district school was yet a year ahead of him, with its wider democratic joys and griefs, and its larger freedom from parental oversight.

When J.W. was six, going on seven, the family moved to Delafield, though retaining ownership of the farm, and for years J.W. spent nearly every Saturday on the old place, in free and blissful association with the Shenk children, whose father was the tenant.  It was here that he and Martin Luther Shenk, already introduced as “Marty,” being of the same age, had sworn eternal friendship, a vow which as yet showed no sign whatever of the ravages of time.  There were three other children, Ben and Alice and Jeannette.  Now, Jeannette was only two years younger than J.W. and Marty, but through most of the years when J.W. was going every week to the farm, she was “only a girl,” and far behind the two chums by all the exacting standards which to boys are more than law.  But there came a time——­