the treasury, a sum more than sufficient to make our room comfortable,
they were quite satisfied. The only thing that troubled them was to know
what to do with the pictures they had drawn. Not one of them was
willing to keep his preposterous landscape in his house. It was Mrs.
Buckby, our president's wife, who suggested a way out of the difficulty.

"Of course," she said to her husband, "it would have been much better if
each one of you had given the two dollars without any raffle, and then
you would have had all your money. But one can't expect men to do a
thing like that."

"Not after we had all paid in our regular dues, and had been subscribing
and subscribing for this, that, and the other thing for nearly a year,"
said I, who was present at the time. "Some extra inducement was
necessary."

"But, as you have all those horrid landscapes," she continued, "why
don't you take them and put them up along the top of your walls, next
the ceiling, where those openings are which used to ventilate the room
when it was used for storage? That would save all the money that you
would have to pay to carpenters and painters to have those places made
tight and decent-looking; and it would give your room a gorgeous
appearance."

This idea was hailed with delight. Every man brought his picture to the
hall, and we nailed the whole hundred in a row along the top of the four
walls, turning one with the darker half up, and the next the other way,
so as to present alternate views of morning and evening along the whole
distance. The arrangement answered admirably. The draughts of air from
outside were perfectly excluded: and as our walls were very lofty, the