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.

But Mr. Trevor possessed a daughter who amply made up for his shortcomings.  She was the only one who could meet Farrar on his own ground, and rarely a meal passed that they did not have a tilt.  They filled up the holes of the conversation with running commentaries, giving a dig at the luckless narrator and a side-slap at each other, until one would have given his oath they were sworn enemies.  At least I, in the innocence of my heart, thought so until I was forcibly enlightened.  I had taken rather a prejudice to Miss Trevor.  I could find no better reason than her antagonism to Farrar.  I was revolving this very thing in my mind one day as I was paddling back to the inn after a look at my client’s new pier and boat-houses, when I descried Farrar’s catboat some distance out.  The lake was glass, and the sail hung lifeless.  It was near lunch-time, and charity prompted me to head for the boat and give it a tow homeward.  As I drew near, Farrar himself emerged from behind the sail and asked me, with a great show of nonchalance, what I wanted.

“To tow you back for lunch, of course,” I answered, used to his ways.

He threw me a line, which I made fast to the stern, and then he disappeared again.  I thought this somewhat strange, but as the boat was a light one, I towed it in and hitched it to the wharf, when, to my great astonishment, there disembarked not Farrar, but Miss Trevor.  She leaped lightly ashore and was gone before I could catch my breath, while Farrar let down the sail and offered me a cigarette.  I had learned a lesson in appearances.

It could not have been very long after this that I was looking over my batch of New York papers, which arrived weekly, when my eye was arrested by a name.  I read the paragraph, which announced the fact that my friend the Celebrity was about to sail for Europe in search of “color” for his next novel; this was already contracted for at a large price, and was to be of a more serious nature than any of his former work.  An interview was published in which the Celebrity had declared that a new novel was to appear in a short time.  I do not know what impelled me, but I began at once to search through the other papers, and found almost identically the same notice in all of them.