In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home; others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events, _look_ more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not. * * * * * The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England hamlet. [Illustration: In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west"] The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the place took its name, is passing a mellow old age as the house of the Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."