Hugh Paret, a corporation lawyer and self-described American romanticist, looks back on the boyhood that formed him and asks how imagination survives in a world ruled by duty, religion, and social restraint. In a changing American city, he grows up under the shadow of a stern Calvinist father, whose disciplined, inaccessible life embodies the severe standards that both shape and stifle him. Against that hard domestic background stand the inherited traditions of his Philadelphia family, the old houses, emigrant ancestors, and Presbyterian rigor that define his world. Yet the boy's true life is elsewhere: in summer escapes to Claremore, where Cousin Robert Breck's country home opens into meadows, orchards, and old-fashioned warmth; in prayers for pocket money, hidden injuries, and Bible stories half-believed as miracles; in elaborate lies, train-robber fantasies, and a winter boat-building scheme that turns a woodshed into a pirate shipyard. As he grows, his gift for storytelling becomes both a source of joy and a quiet rebellion. Nancy's poise, a glimpse of Robert Breck's self-made authority, and the humiliations of business finally push him toward education, evening lessons, and Harvard, where he hopes to claim a fuller life. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.