Professor Kelton's house was guarded on all sides by trees and
shrubbery, and a tall privet hedge shut it off from the Lane. He tended
with his own hands a flower garden whose roses were the despair of all
the women of the community. The clapboards of the simple
story-and-a-half cottage had faded to a dull gray, but the little plot
of ground in which the house stood was cultivated with scrupulous care.
The lawn was always fresh and crisp, the borders of privet were neatly
trimmed and the flower beds disposed effectively. A woman would have
seen at once that this was a man's work; it was all a little too
regular, suggesting engineering methods rather than polite gardening.

Once you had stepped inside the cottage the absence of the feminine
touch was even more strikingly apparent. Book shelves crowded to the
door,--open shelves, that had the effect of pressing at once upon the
visitor the most formidable of dingy volumes, signifying that such
things were of moment to the master of the house. There was no parlor,
for the room that had originally been used as such was now shelf-hung
and book-lined, and served as an approach to the study into which it
opened. The furniture was old and frayed as to upholstery, and the
bric-à-brac on an old-fashioned what-not was faintly murmurous of some
long-vanished feminine hand. The scant lares and penates were sufficient
to explain something of this shiplike trimness of the housekeeping. The
broken half of a ship's wheel clung to the wall above the narrow grate,
and the white marble mantel supported a sextant, a binocular, and other
incidentals of a shipmaster's profession. An engraving of the battle of
Trafalgar and a portrait of Farragut spoke further of the sea. If we
take a liberty and run our eyes over the bookshelves we find many
volumes relating to the development of sea power and textbooks of an old
vintage on the sailing of ships and like matters. And if we were to pry