As they stepped out upon the street a station wagon driven by an old negro appeared promptly at the curb.

“Mawnin’, Cap’n; mawnin’!  Yo’ just on time.  Mis’ Sally tole me to kerry you all right up to the haouse.  Yes, seh.”

Sylvia did not know, what later historians may be interested to learn from these pages, that the station wagon, drawn by a single horse, was for years the commonest vehicle known to the people of the Hoosier capital.  The panic of 1873 had hit the town so hard, the community’s punishment for its sins of inflation had been so drastic, that it had accepted meekly the rebuke implied in its designation as a one-horse town.  In 1884 came another shock to confidence, and in 1893, still another earthquake, as though the knees of the proud must at intervals be humbled.  The one-horse station wagon continued to symbolize the quiet domesticity of the citizens of the Hoosier capital:  women of unimpeachable social standing carried their own baskets through the aisles of the city market or drove home with onion tops waving triumphantly on the seat beside them.  We had not yet hitched our wagon to a gasoline tank, but traffic regulations were enforced by cruel policemen, to the terror of women long given to leisurely manoeuvres on the wrong side of our busiest thoroughfares.  The driving of cattle through Washington Street did not cease until 1888, when cobbles yielded to asphalt.  It was in that same year that Benjamin Harrison was chosen to the seat of the Presidents.  What hallowed niches now enshrine the General’s fence, utterly disintegrated and appropriated, during that bannered and vociferous summer, by pious pilgrims!

Down the busy meridional avenue that opened before Sylvia as they drove uptown loomed the tall shaft of the soldiers’ monument, and they were soon swinging round the encompassing plaza.  Professor Kelton explained that the monument filled a space once called Circle Park, where the Governor’s Mansion had stood in old times.  In her hurried glimpses Sylvia was unable to account for the lack of sociability among the distinguished gentlemen posed in bronze around the circular thoroughfare; and she thought it odd that William Henry Harrison wore so much better clothes than George Rogers Clark, who was immortalized for her especial pleasure in the very act of delivering the Wabash from the British yoke.

“I wonder whether Mrs. Owen will like me?” said Sylvia a little plaintively, the least bit homesick as they turned into Delaware Street.

“Of course she will like you!” laughed Professor Kelton, “though I will say that she doesn’t like everybody by any manner of means.  You mustn’t be afraid of her; she gets on best with people who are not afraid to talk to her.  She isn’t like anybody you ever saw, or, I think, anybody you are ever likely to see again!” And the professor chuckled softly to himself.

Mrs. Owen’s big comfortable brick house stood in that broad part of Delaware Street where the maple arch rises highest, and it was surrounded by the smoothest of lawns, broken only by a stone basin in whose centre posed the jolliest of Cupids holding a green glass umbrella, over which a jet of water played in the most realistic rainstorm imaginable.