I led him out of the room, and by the time he had explained how he had not seen any hack, and had come up by a short-cut that a farmer told him about, he was feeling more in command of himself. It is really a tax on a man’s self possession to be shown through the kitchen and brought face to face with a strange and exceedingly pretty young woman, and I would not care to have anyone think that Sibthorp was one of those hopelessly diffident fellows, whose every contact with their fellow beings is agony. When he came back to the table he went over and shook hands with Ethel, and sat down in his seat quite himself. He was a good-looking fellow, reminding one a little of the pictures of Robert Schumann. His eyes were deep-set and his lips full, and if he had been born twenty years earlier his hair would have been long. The spirit of the times is against excessive hair. The cow boy had it and stuck to it and—the cow boy is going. Whether artists and literary men pondered on the fate of the cow boy, and in order to save themselves, cut their hair, or not, I am not prepared to say, but it is a fact that if all the hair that is _not_ in these United States were to be placed end to end it would encircle the earth time and time again—which beautiful thought I dedicate to the statisticians. “What bracing air you have up here,” said Sibthorp. “Why, I came up the hills like a streak, and I was getting so that a short walk in the city tired me. Isn’t it a great place?” “You’re inoculated soon,” said Cherry. “There’s something in the spirit of this place that makes people stay on and on. I was only invited for a week, and now they can’t get me to go. It’ll be the same with you.” “Ellery,” said I, “the motto of this place is going to be ‘All hope (of getting away) abandon ye who enter here.’ You see, Ethel and I were getting mortally tired of our honeymoon, which had lasted four years, and so we began to invite people up here to relieve our _ennui_.” “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to say that?” said Cherry; but Ethel only laughed. “It’s a fact. At first Minerva (she’s the lady that ushered you in) contributed daily to our amusement and excitement, but now she’s getting to be semi-occasional, and so we’re thinking of our friends who don’t hate the country, and you may be in quite a congested community before you have a chance to go. You play tennis, don’t you?” “I used to when I was a boy.” “Oh, don’t say that. We’re all boys and girls up here. We expect to set up a court to-morrow and there’ll be four of us to play.” “Have you written much lately?” asked Ethel.