People who think of an ordinary row of city houses have no conception of Faculty Row. For one thing, the lots are of widely different sizes. Some, like the one owned by the Misses Forbes, daughters of the geologist, are modest affairs with forty-foot fronts. Others, like Dean Norris's, cover two acres. Those built before 1800 have their birth-years painted carefully over their doorways, and it is an unwritten law that younger houses may not claim this privilege. Many are sheltered by box hedges, and none but has its garden--in which flowers other than hollyhocks, mignonette, larkspur, stock, and bachelor's buttons are considered slightly _nouveaux venus_. As to the occupants of these houses, volumes many times the size of this one might be written. Suffice it for the present, however, that they are quite superior to the general indifference of the outside world, and that, like the dwellers in Cranford, though some may be poor, all are aristocratic. To Tom Reynolds, walking along Tutors' Lane in the dusk of a March afternoon, the scene was considerably different from the verdant one just sketched. Instead of peeping out behind their holly hocks and vines, the houses were still defensively wrapped up against the ice which besieged their walls. Storm doors could not yet be dispensed with, and here and there some practical soul--doubtless connected with the Physics Department--had by means of a railing insured himself against the painful mortification of an icy step. Walking is never good in Tutors' Lane during the winter. Cement walks are not laid, and temporary boards smack a little too much of a makeshift. Arctics are the invariable rule, but even so the going is not easy, and it is particularly bad at this time of year, for now it is that arctics, which never seem able to last through a winter, suddenly give out at the heel and fill with mud and slush. Tom walked on until he came to the Dean's driveway, and then he turned into it. During his college days he had spent a considerable amount of time at the Dean's house, and now, in the first year of his Instructorship, he was there more than ever. His own home in Ephesus, New York, being at the present time occupied by a stepmother for whom he had no particular affection and a father whose interests were in the drygoods rather than the scholastic line, he scarcely thought of himself as having a home other than that made for him by the Dean's wife. It was true that there was an older sister whose husband was a lawyer in Omaha, but she had never approved of his bringing up, and, since she was convinced that he had been spoiled beyond repair, their separation was merciful. At Christmas the family exchanged cheques, and Tom dutifully sent what the Telegraph Company called a "Yule Tide Message," tastefully decorated free of charge. But there family ties ended.