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. Trevor was a trifle
bombastic, with a tendency towards gesticulation, an art which he had
learned in no less a school than the Ohio State Senate. He was a
self-made man,--a fact which he took good care should not escape
one,--and had amassed his money, I believe, in the dry-goods business.
He always wore a long, shiny coat, a low, turned-down collar, and a black
tie, all of which united to give him the general appearance of a
professional pallbearer.