A Hoosier Chronicle | Page 5

have undertaken the
bringing-up of the child without other aid than that of the Irishwoman
who had cooked his meals and taken care of the house ever since Mrs.
Kelton's death. He was still a special lecturer at Madison, and he
derived some income from the sale of his textbooks in mathematics,
which he revised from time to time to bring them in touch with
changing educational methods.
He had given as his reason for resigning a wish to secure leisure for
writing, and he was known to suffer severely at times from the wounds
that had driven him from active naval service. But those who knew him
best imagined that he bore in his breast deeper wounds than those of
war. These old friends of the college circle wondered sometimes at the
strange passing of his daughter and only child, who had vanished from
their sight as a girl, never to return. They were men of quality, these
teachers who had been identified with the college so long; they and
their households were like a large family; and when younger men
joined the faculty and inquired, or when their wives asked perfectly
natural questions about Professor Kelton and Sylvia, their inquiries
were met by an evasion that definitely dismissed the matter. And out of
this spirit, which marked all the social intercourse of the college folk,

affection for Professor Kelton steadily increased, and its light fell upon
Sylvia abundantly. There was a particular smile for her into which
much might be read; there was a tenderness manifested toward her
which communicated itself to the students, who were proud to win her
favor and were forever seeking little excuses for bandying words with
her when they met.
The tradition of Professor Kelton's scholarship had descended to Sylvia
amusingly. She had never attended school, but he had taught her
systematically at home, and his interests were hers. The students
attributed to her the most abstruse knowledge, and stories of her
precocity were repeated proudly by the Lane folk. Many evenings spent
with her grandfather at the observatory had not been wasted. She knew
the paths of the stars as she knew the walks of the campus. Dr.
Wandless, the president emeritus, addressed her always as "My Lady of
the Constellations," and told her solemnly that from much peering
through the telescope she had coaxed the stars into her own eyes.
Professor Kelton and his granddaughter were thus fully identified with
the college and its business, which was to impart knowledge,--an
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.