know; and when her grandfather was so kind,
and her studies so absorbing, it did not seem worth while to trouble
about any state of existence antedating her first clear
recollections--which were of days punctuated and governed by the college
bell, and of people who either taught or studied, with glimpses now and
then of the women and children of the professors' households. There were
times, when the winds whispered sharply round the cottage on winter
nights, or when the snow lay white on the campus and in the woods
beyond, when some memory taunted her, teasing and luring afar off; and
once, as she walked with her grandfather on a day in March, and he
pointed to a flock of wild geese moving _en echelon_ toward the Kankakee
and the far white Canadian frontier, she experienced a similar vague
thrill of consciousness, as though remembering that elsewhere, against
blue spring sky, she had watched similar migrant battalions sweeping
into the north.

She had never known a playmate. The children of the college circle went
to school in town, while she, from her sixth year, was taught
systematically by her grandfather. The faithful oversight of Mary, the
maid-of-all-work, constituted Sylvia's sole acquaintance with anything
approximating maternal care. Mary, unknown to Sylvia and Professor
Kelton, sometimes took counsel--the privilege of her long residence in
the Lane--of some of the professors' wives, who would have been glad to
help directly but for the increasing reserve that had latterly marked
Professor Kelton's intercourse with his friends and neighbors.

Sylvia was vaguely aware of the existence of social distinctions, but in
Buckeye Lane these were entirely negligible; they were, in fact, purely
academic, to be studied with other interesting phenomena by spectacled
professors in quiet laboratories. It may, however, be remarked that
Sylvia had sometimes gazed, not without a twinge, upon the daughter of a
village manufacturer whom she espied flashing through the Lane on a
black pony, and this young person symbolized all worldly grandeur to
Sylvia's adoring vision. Sylvia knew the world chiefly from her
reading,--Miss Alcott's and Mrs. Whitney's stories at first, and "St.
Nicholas" every month, on a certain day that found her meeting the
postman far across the campus; and she had read all the "Frank"
books,--the prized possessions of a neighbor's boy,--from the Maine
woods through the gunboat and prairie exploits of that d