hette. We've had up some of them old philosophers
lately. We've had up Socrates."

"Is that so? It must be very interesting."

Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked
round. Several ladies were coming across the grass toward him from the
hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called
to him, "Good-morning, Mr. Whitwell!" and "Are you going up Lion's
Head to-day?" and "Don't you think it will rain?"--"Guess not," said
Whitwell, with a fatherly urbanity and an air of amusement at the
anxieties of the sex which seemed habitual to him. He waited tranquilly
for them to come up, and then asked, with a wave of his hand toward
Westover: "Acquainted with Mr. Westover, the attist?" He named each of
them, and it would have been no great vanity in Westover to think they
had made their little movement across the grass quite as much in the
hope of an introduction to him as in the wish to consult Whitwell about
his plans.

The painter found himself the centre of an agreeable excitement with all
the ladies in the house. For this it was perhaps sufficient to be a man.
To be reasonably young and decently good-looking, to be an artist,
and an artist not unknown, were advantages which had the splendor of
superfluity.

He liked finding himself in the simple and innocent American
circumstance again, and he was not sorry to be confronted at once with
one of the most characteristic aspects of our summer. He could read
in the present development of Lion's Head House all the history of its
evolution from the first conception of farm-board, which sufficed the
earliest comers, to its growth in the comforts and conveniences which
more fastidious tastes and larger purses demanded. Before this point was
reached, the boarders would be of a good and wholesome sort, but they
would be people of no social advantages, and not of much cultivation,
though they might be intelligent; they would certainly not be
fashionable; five dollars a week implied all that, except in the case
of some wandering artist or the family of some poor young professor. But
when the farm became a boarding-house and called itself a hotel, as at
present with Lion's Head House, and people paid ten dollars a week, or
twelve for transients, a moment of its character was reached which could
not be surpassed when its prosperity became greater and its inmates more
pretentious. In fact, the people who can afford to pay ten dollars a
we