Asa Holmes or At the Cross-roads by Annie Fellows Johnston

THE old saying that "there are always two sides to a story" has worn a deep rut into the popular mind. It has been handed down to us so often with an air of virtuous rebuke, that we have come to regard the individual who insists on his two-sided theory as the acme of all that is broad-minded and tolerant. But in point of fact, if two sides is all he sees, he is only one remove from the bigot whose mental myopia limits him to a single narrow facet.

Even such a thing as a May-day picnic is polyhedral. The little schoolmistress, who was the chief promoter of the one at the Cross-Roads, would have called it a parallelopiped, if she had been there that morning, to have seen the different expressions portrayed on the faces of six people who were interested in it.