AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 



Did you ever watch men at work building a new 

 house? You remember how the ground about the 

 house looks while the building is going on. And 

 after everything is finished and the house is ready 

 to be lived in, how does the ground look then? 



What have the workmen done to make that 

 ground so even and so smooth where it was so rough 

 before? Perhaps you may have stood and watched 

 them when they cut away the rough places and 

 filled in the hollows. 



Did you ever wonder what the place looked like 

 before your house was built there or before any 

 of the houses were built that make up the city in 

 which you live? 



Do you suppose there were hills and valleys there, 

 or was it all flat and even before the streets were 

 made and the houses built? Was there a great forest 

 covering the place long, long ago, or was it an open 

 plain where the wind swept over the grass and the 

 clouds played at hide and seek with their shadows 

 through all the long August days? 



When a new street is laid out and rows of houses 

 are built on either s^ide, the land covered by the 

 street and the houses does not have the same sur- 

 face that it did before anything was built there. For 

 the people who do this work try to have everything 



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