When Professor Hewlett resigned from the chair of English Literature and Letters at B—— College and returned, avowedly, to spend the rest of his days in the home of his forefathers, all Oakland was very glad, but, at the same time, not a little puzzled as to the outcome of the change. There is certainly nothing extraordinary when a man of sixty-five, even though he is still at his intellectual prime, wishes to free himself from harness, and, without wholly leaving the road for the pasture, travel at his own gait; it was the domestic side of the man’s life toward which interest turned, and this side consisted of the possibility of adjusting his family and work under the same roof, for even in his hours of leisure, no one could believe that John Hewlett would let his mental faculties lie dormant. To an outsider this adjustment would have seemed the simplest matter possible, for though the Professor had been twice married, he had survived both wives, each of whom had left an only daughter; but these two, who composed his family, were as unlike in temperament as in personal appearance. The first Mrs. Hewlett, a very handsome woman, whom the Professor had married the year after leaving college, was several years his senior. The Hewletts and Bartons had been people of culture as well as neighbours, and the marriage was the logical outcome of long friendship, rather than the focus of spontaneous love. Father, who was the friend of both, says that at this time John Hewlett was a dreamer, who walked head and shoulders in the air, never heeded his footing, and knew nothing of life; while Catharine Barton had made up her mind on practically every matter of importance, a quality upon which she prided herself being that if she once made a decision, she never allowed circumstances to change it. Aggressively devoted to what she considered her husband’s best interests, had she lived, it is very doubtful if John Hewlett would either have gained fame as a scholar, or won a host of friends by his delightful personality. In half a dozen years he found himself alone with a little daughter Catharine, who was turning four, a beautiful child, but having the ice of her mother’s blood in her veins, and rigid even at that tender age, sitting bolt upright in her father’s lap and checking him with wide-eyed reproof if, in clasping her to him, her gown or hair was rumpled. Then the Professor gave the child over to his people to rear, and, turning his face away from women, save in the polite abstract, devoted himself to work.