It was the evening of one of the most perfect days in an Indian summer of notable loveliness. In this refulgent weather, to quote Emerson, who knew well what he spoke of, "it was a luxury to draw the breath of life." Free equally from the enervating heat and insects of high summer, and the numbing rigour of the Eastern winter, the days passed in dignified procession, calm and temperate, roseate with the blazing foliage of autumn, and gay with geraniums and marigolds. On our modest pergola there still clung a few ruby-coloured grapes, though the leaves were scattered, and in the beds about our verandah blue cornflowers and yellow nasturtiums enamelled the untidy carpet of coarse grasses that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a factitious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect title, was cut diagonally by a footpath leading down to Broad Street, where, out of sight but not of hearing, trolley-cars between Newark and Paterson thundered at uncertain intervals. It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of the _New York Daily News_, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (_No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450_) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pass on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generally behind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.