rk.

Mohair was finished and ready for occupation in July, two years after
the suit. I drove out one day before Mr. Cooke's arrival to look it
over. The grounds, where Farrar had had matters pretty much his own way,
to my mind rivalled the best private parks in the East. The stables were
filled with a score or so of Mr. Cooke's best horses, brought hither
in his private cars, and the trotters were exercising on the track.
The middle of June found Farrar and myself at the Asquith Inn. It was
Farrar's custom to go to Asquith in the summer, being near the forest
properties in his charge; and since Asquith was but five miles from the
county-seat it was convenient for me, and gave me the advantages of
the lake breezes and a comparative rest, which I should not have had
in town. At that time Asquith was a small community of summer residents
from Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and other western cities, most of
whom owned cottages and the grounds around them. They were a quiet lot
that long association had made clannish; and they had a happy faculty,
so rare in summer resorts, of discrimination between an amusement and a
nuisance. Hence a great many diversions which are accounted pleasurable
elsewhere are at Asquith set down at their true value. It was,
therefore, rather with resentment than otherwise that the approaching
arrival of Mr. Cooke and the guests he was likely to have at Mohair were
looked upon.

I had not been long at Asquith before I discovered that Farrar was
acting in a peculiar manner, though I was longer in finding out what the
matter was. I saw much less of him than in town. Once in a while in the
evenings, after ten, he would run across me on the porch of the inn,
or drift into my rooms. Even after three years of more or less
intimacy between us, Farrar still wore his exterior of pessimism and
indifference, the shell with which he chose to hide a naturally warm and
affectionate disposition. In the dining-room we sat together at the end
of a large table set aside for bachelors and small families of two
or three, and it seemed as though we had all the humorists and
story-tellers in that place. And Farrar as a source of amusement proved
equal to the best of them. He would wait until a story was well under
way, and then annihilate the point of it with a cutting cynicism and set
the table in a roar of laughter. Among others who were seated here was
a Mr. Trevor, of Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of Asquith. Mr.