contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won
by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while
their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you
looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"

The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today.
He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it
interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly
if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King
John?" He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact
that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.

Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered
town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not
appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had
assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.



III


Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie
villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly
kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he
had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its
garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New
England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River,
hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before