“Not actually seen.  But often in the evenings I’ve heard them buzzing as they unspin the day’s wind-up.  During the day, you see, they make as many as ten or fifteen revolutions until their eyes bung out.  Reversing makes them very dizzy, and if you are around when they’re doing it, you can often pick them up off the sand.”

“And doesn’t it ever make you dizzy?  All this local lore, I mean, that you carry around in your head?”

“It isn’t much of a strain to a practiced intellect,” he deprecated.  “If you’re interested in natural history, there’s the Side-hill Wampus—­”

“Yes; I know.  I’ve been West before, thank you!  Pardon my curiosity, but are all you creatures of the desert queer and inexplicable?”

“Not me,” he returned promptly if ungrammatically, “if you’re looking in my direction.”

“I’ll admit that I find you as interesting as the owl—­almost.  And quite as hard to understand.”

“Nobody ever called me queer; not to my face.”

“But you are, you know.  You oughtn’t to be here at all.”

“Where ought I to be?”

“How can I answer that riddle without knowing where you have been?  Are you Ulysses—­”

“‘Knowing cities and the hearts of men,’” he answered, quick to catch the reference.  “No; not the cities, certainly, and very little of the men.”

“There, you see!” she exclaimed plaintively.  “You’re up on a classical reference like a college man.  No; not like the college men I know, either.  They are too immersed in their football and rowing and too afraid to be thought high-brow, to confess to knowing anything about Ulysses.  What was your college?”

“This,” he said, sweeping a hand around the curve of the horizon.

“And in any one else,” she retorted, “that would be priggish as well as disingenuous.”

“I suppose I know what you mean.  Out here, when a man doesn’t explain himself, they think it’s for some good reason of his own, or bad reason, more likely.  In either case, they don’t ask questions.”

“I really beg your pardon, Mr. Banneker!”

“No; that isn’t what I meant at all.  If you’re interested, I’d like to have you know about me.  It isn’t much, though.”

“You’ll think me prying,” she objected.

“I think you a sort of friend of a day, who is going away very soon leaving pleasant memories,” he answered, smiling.  “A butterfly visit.  I’m not much given to talking, but if you’d like it—­”

“Of course I should like it.”

So he sketched for her his history.  His mother he barely remembered; “dark, and quite beautiful, I believe, though that might be only a child’s vision; my father rarely spoke of her, but I think all the emotional side of his life was buried with her.”  The father, an American of Danish ancestry, had been ousted from the chair of Sociology in old, conservative Havenden College, as the logical result of his writings which, because they shrewdly