d humor. Even at
fifteen, her lips suggest firmness and decision. Her forehead is high
and broad, and her head is well set on straight shoulders. Her dark hair
is combed back smoothly and braided and the braid is doubled and tied
with a red ribbon. The same color flashes in a flowing bow at her
throat. These notes will serve to identify Sylvia as she crosses the
campus of this honorable seat of learning on a June afternoon.

This particular June afternoon fell somewhat later than the second
consulship of Grover Cleveland and well within the ensuing period of
radicalism. The Hoosiers with whom we shall have to do are not those set
forth by Eggleston, but the breed visible to-day in urban marketplaces,
who submit themselves meekly to tailors and schoolmasters. There is
always corn in their Egypt, and no village is so small but it lifts a
smokestack toward a sky that yields nothing to Italy's. The heavens are
a soundingboard devised for the sole purpose of throwing back the
mellifluous voices of native orators. At the cross-roads store,
philosophers, perched upon barrel and soap-box (note the soap-box),
clinch in endless argument. Every county has its Theocritus who sings
the nearest creek, the bloom of the may-apple, the squirrel on the
stake-and-rider fence, the rabbit in the corn, the paw-paw thicket where
fruit for the gods lures farm boys on frosty mornings in golden autumn.
In olden times the French _voyageur_, paddling his canoe from Montreal
to New Orleans, sang cheerily through the Hoosier wilderness, little
knowing that one day men should stand all night before bulletin boards
in New York and Boston awaiting the judgment of citizens of the Wabash
country upon the issues of national campaigns. The Hoosier, pondering
all things himself, cares little what Ohio or Illinois may think or do.
He ventures eastward to Broadway only to deepen his satisfaction in the
lights of Washington or Main Street at home. He is satisfied to live
upon a soil more truly blessed than any that lies beyond the borders of
his own commonwealth. No wonder Ben Parker, of Henry County, born in a
log cabin, attuned his lyre to the note of the first blue-bird and
sang,--

'Tis morning and the days are long.

It is always morning and all the days are long in Indiana.

Sylvia was three years old when she came to her grandfather's. This she
knew from the old servant; but where her earlier years had been spent or
why or with whom she did not