"Now mind," he said to me, "you promised that the other men should not
laugh at me, and I hold you to your contract."

I answered that I intended to stand by it, and that the painting should
be sent to him in the morning from my house, whither it had been
removed. Every member present announced his intention of calling on
Horter the following evening to see why he should not be laughed at.

All the next forenoon my man, with a horse and light wagon, was engaged
in delivering the reversible landscapes, one to every member of our
club. These gentlemen were, in almost every case, absent at their places
of business. When they came home in the evening each found his picture,
with his name on the back of it, and a printed slip informing him that
in this raffle there had been no blanks, and that every man had drawn a
prize.

Not a man called upon Mr. Horter that evening, and he greatly wondered
why they did not come in, either to laugh or to say why they should 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