ld not
do so; but every other member of our club was visited by nearly all his
fellow-firemen, who ran in to see if it were true that he also had one
of those ridiculous reversible landscapes. As everybody knew that Mr.
Horter had one, there was no need to call on him; and even if they had
hoped to be able to laugh at him they could not do so, when each of them
had drawn one of the pictures himself. A good many called on me, and
some were a little severe in their remarks, saying that although it
might be a very pretty joke, I must have used up nearly all the money
that they had given for the good of the Association, for, of course,
none of them cared for the absurd prize.

But when, on the next meeting night, I paid in one hundred dollars to
the treasury, a sum more than sufficient to make our room comfortable,
they were quite satisfied. The only thing that troubled them was to know
what to do with the pictures they had drawn. Not one of them was
willing to keep his preposterous landscape in his house. It was Mrs.
Buckby, our president's wife, who suggested a way out of the difficulty.

"Of course," she said to her husband, "it would have been much better if
each one of you had given the two dollars without any raffle, and then
you would have had all your money. But one can't expect men to do a
thing like that."

"Not after we had all paid in our regular dues, and had been subscribing
and subscribing for this, that, and the other thing for nearly a year,"
said I, who was present at the time. "Some extra inducement was
necessary."

"But, as you have all those horrid landscapes," she continued, "why
don't you take them and put them up along the top of your walls, next
the ceiling, where those openings are which used to ventilate the room
when it was used for storage? That would save all the money that you
would have to pay to carpenters and painters to have those places made
tight and decent-looking; and it would give your room a gorgeous
appearance."

This idea was hailed with delight. Every man brought his picture to the
hall, and we nailed the whole hundred in a row along the top of the four
walls, turning one with the darker half up, and the next the other way,
so as to present alternate views of morning and evening along the whole
distance. The arrangement answered admirably. The draughts of air from
outside were perfectly excluded: and as our walls were very lofty, the
general effect was good.

"Art of that