CHAPTER

     I the toy balloon
    II the heroic day
   III the cottage
    IV the ravished Nest
     V Adam
    VI the cooking class
   VII the Republican candidate
  VIII the note
    IX the election
     X the camp
    XI Lydia giggles
   XII the high school senior
  XIII the Indian celebration
   XIV the Harvard instructor
    XV the investigation begins
   XVI Ducit Amor Patriae
  XVII the military hop
 XVIII the end of A great search
   XIX cap and gown
    XX the youngest scholar

LYDIA OF THE PINES

CHAPTER I

THE TOY BALLOON

“I am the last of my kind.  This is the very peak of loneliness.”—­The Murmuring Pine.

There is a State in the North Mississippi Valley unexcelled for its quiet beauty.  To the casual traveler there may be a certain monotony in the unending miles of rolling green hills, stretching on and on into distant, pale skies.  But the native of the State knows that the monotony is only seeming.

He knows that the green hills shelter in their gentle valleys many placid lakes.  Some of them are shallow and bordered with wild rice.  Some are couched deep in the hollow of curving bluffs.  Some are carefully secreted in virgin pine woods.  From the train these pines are little suspected.  Fire and the ax have long since destroyed any trace of their growth along the railway.

Yet if the traveler but knew, those distant purple shadows against the sky-line are primeval pine woods, strange to find in a State so highly cultivated, so dotted with thriving towns.

In summer the whole great State is a wonderland of color.  Wide wheat lands of a delicate yellowish green sweep mile on mile till brought to pause by the black green of the woods.  Mighty acres of corn land, blue-green, march on the heels of the wheat.  Great pastures riotous with early goldenrod are thick dotted with milk herds.  White farmhouses with red barns and little towns with gray roofs and green shaded streets dot the State like flower beds.

An old State, as we measure things out of New England, settled by New Englanders during the first great emigration after the War of 1812.  Its capital, Lake City, lays claim to almost a century of existence.  Lying among the hills in the northern part of the State, it contains both the state capitol and the state university.  Of its thirty thousand inhabitants, five thousand are students and another five thousand are state legislators and state employees.

The town is one of quiet loveliness.  It lies in the curving shore of one of the most beautiful of the little inland lakes.  The university campus lies at the northern end of the curve.  The dome of the capitol rises from the trees at the southern end.  Between, deep lawns stretch to the water’s edge with fine old houses capping the gentle slope of the shore.  Inland lies the business section of the town, with the less pretentious of the dwellings.  The whole city is dotted with great elms and maples, planted three quarters of a century ago.