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?”
“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.
It was curious to see the extra animation that came into Sibthorp’s face at her question. Tennis had left him cold, but the mention of the works of Sibthorp roused him.
It is the fashion to laugh at this tendency in writers, but I have a dim suspicion that the engineer is roused to greater interest at mention of some engineering problem he has solved, than he is at the ordinary topics of the day, and so it is with all.
“Had something accepted last week,” said he. “It had been everywhere, and if it had come back again, I would have burned it up, but the _Atlantic_ took it, and the only reason I didn’t send there at first was because I thought it wasn’t good enough.”