Golden rod was yellowing the lanes and fields and roads, and here and there purple asters were foretelling the approach of winter. The nights were getting chilly and providing an excellent excuse for pine knot wood fires, around which we all gathered and told stories or listened to Cherry’s piano music or to heated but amicable art discussions on the part of the three brushmen.
Two goal points beckoned us to the future; one of them the centennial anniversary of good old Mrs. Hartlett, the other the cattle show at Oakham.
The former would fall on September 16th; the latter on October 3rd, and the day after the cattle show our happy household would break up. We expected to go down with the rest and open up our flat and we regretted the necessity of doing so, as the time approached.
We had grown to love the country in all its moods and I felt sure that in winter also we would find it full of the stimulus of life, but even with James for a companion, we knew that Minerva would not outstay the first snow storm, and since his situation with the liveryman now only awaited my announcement and his acceptance of it, we were going to count the winter in New York as simply so many days of anticipation of the next summer’s joys with perhaps the same crowd of congenial people, and it might be two of them keeping house in a new bungalow.
After all, Hepburn was better fitted than Sibthorp to make a husband for Cherry. She was a girl with luxurious tastes and the very fact that she could live our simple life and be happy argued that she would make an ideal helpmate for the man who had been born with a diamond encrusted spoon in his mouth.
Mrs. Warden thought that Billy also was smitten, but if so Cherry did not know it.
The centenary of Mrs. Hartlett fell on a perfect day. The morning broke, cool and cloudless and a brisk west wind policed the air all day and kept it free from disorderly elements.
At three o’clock we all went over to her house on foot. Sibthorp and the artists had ransacked a greenhouse at Egerton and were loaded down with roses: Hepburn had been fortunate enough to buy a century plant in bloom and the rest of us bore other offerings.
On the little lawn in front of her house sat Mrs. Hartlett on a stiff-backed chair that had belonged to her grandfather. She was alert and smiling and actually rosy. Her hundred year old eyes sparkled with animation and she was just as proud of having achieved a century as any wheelman ever was.
There were at the lowest estimate two hundred people gathered on the lawn about the old lady, and I’ll venture to say that not five of them were there out of idle curiosity. There were Minerva and James and the president of the Egerton National Bank, and the pastors of three churches of different protestant denominations and a comparatively newly arrived Hungarian family, to whom Mrs. Hartlett had been “neighbourly,” and Father Hogan and the Guernseas and the man whose pipe I had returned. (He had brought Mrs. Hartlett a peach pit basket, which he had whittled himself and which gave her great joy, as she said it was exactly like one that her brother had given her in 1812).