old-fashioned but not yet wholly neglected function at Madison.  She reckoned time by semesters; the campus had always been her playground; and the excitements of her life were those of a small and sober academic community.  The darkest tragedies she had known had, indeed, been related to the life of the college,—­the disciplining of the class of ’01 for publishing itself in numerals on the face of the court-house clock; the recurring conflicts between town and gown that shook the community every Washington’s birthday; the predatory habits of the Greek professor’s cow, that botanized freely in alien gardens and occasionally immured herself in Professor Kelton’s lettuce frames; these and like heroic matters had marked the high latitudes of Sylvia’s life.  In the long vacations, when most of the faculty sought the Northern lakes, the Keltons remained at home; and Sylvia knew all the trees of the campus, and could tell you just what books she had read under particular maples or elms.

Andrew Kelton was a mathematical scholar of high attainments.  In the field of astronomy he had made important discoveries, and he carried on an extensive correspondence with observers of stellar phenomena in many far corners of the world.  His name in the Madison catalogue was followed by a bewildering line of cabalistic letters testifying to the honor in which other institutions of learning held him.  Wishing to devise for him a title that combined due recognition of both his naval exploits and his fine scholarship, the undergraduates called him “Capordoc”; and it was part of a freshman’s initiation to learn that at all times and in all places he was to stand and uncover when Professor Kelton passed by.

Professor Kelton’s occasional lectures in the college were a feature of the year, and were given in Mills Hall to accommodate the large audience of students and town folk that never failed to assemble every winter to hear him.  For into discourses on astronomy he threw an immense amount of knowledge of all the sciences, and once every year, though no one ever knew when he would be moved to relate it, he told a thrilling story of how once, guided by the stars, he had run a Confederate blockade in a waterlogged ironclad under a withering fire from the enemy’s batteries.  And when he had finished and the applause ceased, he glanced about with an air of surprise and said:  “Thank you, young gentlemen; it pleases me to find you so enthusiastic in your pursuit of knowledge.  Learn the stars and you won’t get lost in strange waters.  As we were saying—­” It was because of still other stories which he never told or referred to, but which are written in the nation’s history, that the students loved him; and it was for this that they gave him at every opportunity their lustiest cheer.

The professor found the stranger Sylvia had announced waiting for him at the cottage.  The young man did not mention his own name but drew from his pocket a sealed letter.