s, at a time when Montgomery,
for all its dignity as the seat of the county court, was the most
colorless of Hoosier hamlets, save only as the prevailing mud colored
everything. Buckeye Lane was originally a cow-path, in the good old
times when every reputable villager kept a red cow and pastured it in
the woodlot that subsequently became Madison Athletic Field. In those
days the Madison faculty, and their wives and daughters, seeking social
diversion among the hospitable townfolk, picked their way down the Lane
by lantern light. An ignorant municipal council had later, when natural
gas threatened to boom the town into cityhood, changed Buckeye Lane to
University Avenue, but the community refused to countenance any such
impious trifling with tradition. And besides, Madison prided herself
then as now on being a college that taught the humanities in all
soberness, according to ideals brought out of New England by its
founders. The proposed change caused an historic clash between town and
gown in which the gown triumphed. University forsooth!

Professor Kelton's house was guarded on all sides by trees and
shrubbery, and a tall privet hedge shut it off from the Lane. He tended
with his own hands a flower garden whose roses were the despair of all
the women of the community. The clapboards of the simple
story-and-a-half cottage had faded to a dull gray, but the little plot
of ground in which the house stood was cultivated with scrupulous care.
The lawn was always fresh and crisp, the borders of privet were neatly
trimmed and the flower beds disposed effectively. A woman would have
seen at once that this was a man's work; it was all a little too
regular, suggesting engineering methods rather than polite gardening.

Once you had stepped inside the cottage the absence of the feminine
touch was even more strikingly apparent. Book shelves crowded to the
door,--open shelves, that had the effect of pressing at once upon the
visitor the most formidable of dingy volumes, signifying that such
things were of moment to the master of the house. There was no parlor,
for the room that had originally been used as such was now shelf-hung
and book-lined, and served as an approach to the study into which it
opened. The furniture was old and frayed as to upholstery, and the
bric-a-brac on an old-fashioned what-not was faintly murmurous of some
long-vanished feminine hand. The scant lares and penates were sufficient
to explain something of this