But the same air that has a lazing effect on writers braces up artists to do good work. Tom had painted two landscapes since his arrival and Billy and Jack went out after supper and each took a shy at the same sunset. It was curious to see how different were the colors each used. And the sun had used another palette altogether. And yet all three sunsets were beautiful and I dare say that one was as true as the other, all of them being illusions. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXI THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY. IT may not possess any interest to the reader, but I feel that we have been together so long (if he has not skipped) that he _will_ be interested to know that early in September an editor in New York wrote me, saying that he would take a long story of mine at such a figure that—well, our summer outing was more than paid for and on receipt of the check I stopped keeping a hotel and insisted on my “guests” becoming guests—a distinction with a wide difference. Golden rod was yellowing the lanes and fields and roads, and here and there purple asters were foretelling the approach of winter. The nights were getting chilly and providing an excellent excuse for pine knot wood fires, around which we all gathered and told stories or listened to Cherry’s piano music or to heated but amicable art discussions on the part of the three brushmen. Two goal points beckoned us to the future; one of them the centennial anniversary of good old Mrs. Hartlett, the other the cattle show at Oakham. The former would fall on September 16th; the latter on October 3rd, and the day after the cattle show our happy household would break up. We expected to go down with the rest and open up our flat and we regretted the necessity of doing so, as the time approached. We had grown to love the country in all its moods and I felt sure that in winter also we would find it full of the stimulus of life, but even with James for a companion, we knew that Minerva would not outstay the first snow storm, and since his situation with the liveryman now only awaited my announcement and his acceptance of it, we were going to count the winter in New York as simply so many days of anticipation of the next summer’s joys with perhaps the same crowd of congenial people, and it might be two of them keeping house in a new bungalow.