thing I want to speak of is the space they give to farmers’ and stockmen’s societies when they meet here.  The last time the Hoosier State Mulefoot Hog Association met right here in town at the Horticultural Society’s room at the State House—­all the notice they got in the ‘Courier’ was five lines in ‘Minor Mention.’  The same day the State Bankers’ Association filled three columns, and most of that was a speech by Tom Adams on currency reform.  You might tell that funny editorial man to give Adams a poke now and then, and stop throwing chestnuts about gold bricks and green goods at farmers.  And he needn’t show the bad state of his liver by sarcastically speaking of farmers as honest husbandmen either; a farmer is a farmer, unless, for lack of God’s grace, he’s a fool!  I guess the folks are coming now.  I hope Allen won’t knock down the house with that threshing-machine of his.  That’s all this time.  Let me see—­you’d better tell your editor to call on me now and then.  What did you say his name was, Morton?”

“Atwill—­Arthur P.”

“Is he a son of that Ebenezer Atwill who used to be a professor in Asbury College?”

“I’m afraid not, Aunt Sally; I don’t think he ever heard of Ebenezer,” replied Bassett, with all the irony he dared.

CHAPTER XXII

THE GRAY SISTERHOOD

Elizabeth House was hospitable to male visitors, and Dan found Sylvia there often on the warm, still summer evenings, when the young women of the household filled the veranda and overflowed upon the steps.  Sylvia’s choice of a boarding-house had puzzled Dan a good deal, but there were a good many things about Sylvia that baffled him.  For example, this preparation for teaching in a public school when she might have had an assistant professorship in a college seemed a sad waste of energy and opportunity.  She was going to school to her inferiors, he maintained, submitting to instruction as meekly as though she were not qualified to enlighten her teachers in any branch of knowledge.  It was preposterous that she should deliberately elect to spend the hottest of summers in learning to combine the principles of Pestalozzi with the methods of Dewey and Kendall.

The acquaintance of Sylvia and Allen prospered from the start.  She was not only a new girl in town, and one capable of debating the questions that interested him, but he was charmed with Elizabeth House, which was the kind of thing, he declared, that he had always stood for.  The democracy of the veranda, the good humor and ready give and take of the young women delighted him.  They liked him and openly called him “our beau.”  He established himself on excellent terms with the matron to the end that he might fill his automobile with her charges frequently and take them for runs into the country.  When Dan grumbled over Sylvia’s absurd immolation on the altar of education, Allen pronounced her the grandest girl in the world and the glory of the Great Experiment.