make me ashamed of myself."

"You needn't be," laughed Sylvia. "Very likely most that I've told you
is wrong. I'm glad grandfather didn't hear me."

The admiral and Professor Kelton were launched upon a fresh exchange of
reminiscences and the return of Ware and Sylvia did not disturb them. It
seemed, however, that Ware was a famous story-teller, and when he had
lighted a fresh cigar he recounted a number of adventures, speaking in
his habitual, dry, matter-of-fact tone, and with curious unexpected
turns of phrase. Conversation in Indiana seems to drift into
story-telling inevitably. John Ware once read a paper before the
Indianapolis Literary Club to prove that this Hoosier trait was derived
from the South. He drew a species of ellipsoid of which the Ohio River
was the axis, sketching his line to include the Missouri of Mark Twain,
the Illinois of Lincoln, the Indiana of Eggleston and Riley, and the
Kentucky that so generously endowed these younger commonwealths. North
of the Ohio the anecdotal genius diminished, he declared, as one moved
toward the Great Lakes into a region where there had been an infusion of
population from New England and the Middle States. He suggested that the
early pioneers, having few books and no newspapers, had cultivated the
art of story-telling for their own entertainment and that the soldiers
returning from the Civil War had developed it further. Having made this
note of his thesis I hasten to run away from it. Let others, prone to
interminable debate, tear it to pieces if they must. This kind of social
intercourse, with its intimate talk, the references to famous public
characters, as though they were only human beings after all, the
anecdotal interchange, was wholly novel to Sylvia. She thought Ware's
stories much droller than the admiral's, and quite as good as her
grandfather's, which was a great concession.

The minister was beginning a new story. He knocked the ashes from his
cigar and threw out his arms with one of his odd, jerky gestures.

"There's a good deal of fun in living in the woods. Up in the
Adirondacks there was a lot for the boys to do when I was a youngster. I
liked winter better than summer; school was in winter, but when you had
the fun of fighting big drifts to get to it you didn't mind getting
licked after you got there. The silence of night in the woods, when the
snow is deep, the wind still, and the moon at full, is the solemnest
thing in the world. Not really o