Ware struck his knee with his hand and chuckled.

“I should say you do know a few!  You’ve mentioned some I’ve always wanted to get acquainted with.  Now go back to Cygnus, the Swan.  I like the name of that one; I must be sure to remember it.”

Politeness certainly demanded that Sylvia should answer; and now that the minister plied her with questions, her own interest was aroused, and she led him back and forth across the starry lanes, describing in the most artless fashion her own method of remembering the names and positions of the constellations.  As their range of vision on the veranda was circumscribed, Ware suggested that they step down upon the lawn to get a wider sweep, a move which attracted the attention of the others.

“Sylvia, be careful of the wet.  Josephus just moved the sprinkler and that ground is soaked.”

“Don’t call attention to our feet; our heads are in the stars,” answered Ware.  “I must tell the Indian boys on the Nipigon about this,” he said to Sylvia as they returned to the veranda.  “I didn’t know anybody knew as much as you do.  You 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.