MY LADY OF THE CONSTELLATIONS


Sylvia was reading in her grandfather's library when the bell tinkled.
Professor Kelton had few callers, and as there was never any certainty
that the maid-of-all-work would trouble herself to answer, Sylvia put
down her book and went to the door. Very likely it was a student or a
member of the faculty, and as her grandfather was not at home Sylvia was
quite sure that the interruption would be the briefest.

The Kelton cottage stood just off the campus, and was separated from it
by a narrow street that curved round the college and stole, after many
twists and turns, into town. This thoroughfare was called "Buckeye
Lane," or more commonly the "Lane." The college had been planted
literally in the wilderness by its founders, at a time when Montgomery,
for all its dignity as the seat of the county court, was the most
colorless of Hoosier hamlets, save only as the prevailing mud colored
everything. Buckeye Lane was originally a cow-path, in the good old
times when every reputable villager kept a red cow and pastured it in
the woodlot that subsequently became Madison Athletic Field. In those
days the Madison faculty, and their wives and daughters, seeking social
diversion among the hospitable townfolk, picked their way down the Lane
by lantern light. An ignorant municipal council had later, when natural
gas threatened to boom the town into cityhood, changed Buckeye Lane to
University Avenue, but the community refused to countenance any such
impious trifling with tradition. And besides, Madison prided herself
then as now on being a college that taught the humanities in all
soberness, according to ideals brought out of New England by its
founders. The proposed change caused an historic clash between town and
gown in which the gown triumphed. University forsooth!