After all, Hepburn was better fitted than Sibthorp to make a husband for Cherry. She was a girl with luxurious tastes and the very fact that she could live our simple life and be happy argued that she would make an ideal helpmate for the man who had been born with a diamond encrusted spoon in his mouth. Mrs. Warden thought that Billy also was smitten, but if so Cherry did not know it. The centenary of Mrs. Hartlett fell on a perfect day. The morning broke, cool and cloudless and a brisk west wind policed the air all day and kept it free from disorderly elements. At three o’clock we all went over to her house on foot. Sibthorp and the artists had ransacked a greenhouse at Egerton and were loaded down with roses: Hepburn had been fortunate enough to buy a century plant in bloom and the rest of us bore other offerings. On the little lawn in front of her house sat Mrs. Hartlett on a stiff-backed chair that had belonged to her grandfather. She was alert and smiling and actually rosy. Her hundred year old eyes sparkled with animation and she was just as proud of having achieved a century as any wheelman ever was. There were at the lowest estimate two hundred people gathered on the lawn about the old lady, and I’ll venture to say that not five of them were there out of idle curiosity. There were Minerva and James and the president of the Egerton National Bank, and the pastors of three churches of different protestant denominations and a comparatively newly arrived Hungarian family, to whom Mrs. Hartlett had been “neighbourly,” and Father Hogan and the Guernseas and the man whose pipe I had returned. (He had brought Mrs. Hartlett a peach pit basket, which he had whittled himself and which gave her great joy, as she said it was exactly like one that her brother had given her in 1812). But to go back to the guests. Such a heterogeneous collection of people one does not often see, and yet they all had one common object; to render homage to a woman who, for a century, had breathed a spirit of kindliness and tolerance that was American in the best sense. Yankee farmer, Hungarian immigrant, Pat Casey—who was there, alert and smiling—all were the better for Mrs. Hartlett’s having lived so long a life, and each one felt it in his own way. And almost every one present had brought a gift. In some instances they were trifling affairs—like the peach pit basket—but the kindly spirit of giving was there, and I doubt not that Mrs. Hartlett valued the little carving for the sake of the associations it brought up full as well as she did the handsome antique chair that the Guernseas gave her.