It is always morning and all the days are long in Indiana.
Sylvia was three years old when she came to her grandfather's. This she
knew from the old servant; but where her earlier years had been spent or
why or with whom she did not know; and when her grandfather was so kind,
and her studies so absorbing, it did not seem worth while to trouble
about any state of existence antedating her first clear
recollections--which were of days punctuated and governed by the college
bell, and of people who either taught or studied, with glimpses now and
then of the women and children of the professors' households. There were
times, when the winds whispered sharply round the cottage on winter
nights, or when the snow lay white on the campus and in the woods
beyond, when some memory taunted her, teasing and luring afar off; and
once, as she walked with her grandfather on a day in March, and he
pointed to a flock of wild geese moving _en echelon_ toward the Kankakee
and the far white Canadian frontier, she experienced a similar vague
thrill of consciousness, as though remembering that elsewhere, against
blue spring sky, she had watched similar migrant battalions sweeping
into the north.
She had never known a playmate. The children of the college circle went
to school in town, while she, from her sixth year, was taught
systematically by her grandfather.
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