This particular June afternoon fell somewhat later than the second consulship of Grover Cleveland and well within the ensuing period of radicalism.  The Hoosiers with whom we shall have to do are not those set forth by Eggleston, but the breed visible to-day in urban marketplaces, who submit themselves meekly to tailors and schoolmasters.  There is always corn in their Egypt, and no village is so small but it lifts a smokestack toward a sky that yields nothing to Italy’s.  The heavens are a soundingboard devised for the sole purpose of throwing back the mellifluous voices of native orators.  At the cross-roads store, philosophers, perched upon barrel and soap-box (note the soap-box), clinch in endless argument.  Every county has its Theocritus who sings the nearest creek, the bloom of the may-apple, the squirrel on the stake-and-rider fence, the rabbit in the corn, the paw-paw thicket where fruit for the gods lures farm boys on frosty mornings in golden autumn.  In olden times the French voyageur, paddling his canoe from Montreal to New Orleans, sang cheerily through the Hoosier wilderness, little knowing that one day men should stand all night before bulletin boards in New York and Boston awaiting the judgment of citizens of the Wabash country upon the issues of national campaigns.  The Hoosier, pondering all things himself, cares little what Ohio or Illinois may think or do.  He ventures eastward to Broadway only to deepen his satisfaction in the lights of Washington or Main Street at home.  He is satisfied to live upon a soil more truly blessed than any that lies beyond the borders of his own commonwealth.  No wonder Ben Parker, of Henry County, born in a log cabin, attuned his lyre to the note of the first blue-bird and sang,—­

     ’Tis morning and the days are long.

It is always morning and all the days are long in Indiana.

Sylvia was three years old when she came to her grandfather’s.  This she knew from the old servant; but where her earlier years had been spent or why or with whom she did not 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.