When Men Grew Tall, or The Story of Andrew Jackson

THEODORE ROOSEVELT THAT MAN OF THE PUBLIC FOR WHOM I HAVE MOST REGARD AND FROM WHOSE FUTURE I AS AN AMERICAN MOST HOPE THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
CONTENTS

IN this year of our Lord's grace, 1787, the ancient town of Salisbury, seat of justice for Rowan County, and the buzzing metropolis of its region, numbers by word of a partisan citizenry eight hundred souls. Its streets are unpaved, and present an unbroken expanse of red North Carolina clay from one narrow plank sidewalk to another. In the summer, if the weather be dry, the red clay resolves itself into blinding brick-red dust. In the spring, when the rains fall, it lapses into brick-red mud, and the Salisbury streets become bottomless morasses, the despair of travelers. Just now, it being a bright October afternoon and a shower having paid the town a visit but an hour before, the streets offer no suggestion of either mud or dust, but are as clean and straight and beautiful as a good man's morals. Trees rank either side, and their branches interlock overhead. These make every street a cathedral aisle, groined and arched in leafy green.
In one of the suburbs, that is to say about pistol shot from the town's commercial center, stands a two-story mansion. It is painted white, and thereby distinguished above its neighbors, and has a heavily columned veranda all across its wide face. This edifice is the residence of Spruce McCay, a foremost member of the Rowan County bar.
In a corner of the lawn, which unfolds verdantly in front of the house, is a one-story one-room structure, the law office of Spruce McCay. Inside are two or three pine desks, much visited of knives in the past, and a half-dozen ramshackle chairs, which have seen stronger if not better days. Also there is a collection of shelves; and these latter hold scores of law books, among which “Blackstone's Commentaries,” “Coke on Littleton,” and “Hales's Pleas of the Crown” are given prominent place. The books show musty and dog-eared, and it is many years since the youngest among them came from the printing press.