vises His apostles to take a vacation. They have been
living an excited as well as a useful life, and He advises that they
get out into the country. When, six weeks ago, standing in this place,
I advocated, with all the energy I could command, the Saturday
afternoon holiday, I did not think the people would so soon get that
release. By divine fiat it has come, and I rejoice that more people
will have opportunity of recreation this summer than in any previous
summer. Others will have whole weeks and months of rest. The railway
trains are being laden with passengers and baggage on their way to the
mountains and the lakes and the sea-shore. Multitudes of our citizens
are packing their trunks for a restorative absence.

The city heats are pursuing the people with torch and fear of
sunstroke. The long silent halls of sumptuous hotels are all abuzz
with excited arrivals. The crystalline surface of Winnipiseogee is
shattered with the stroke of steamer, laden with excursionists. The
antlers of Adirondack deer rattle under the shot of city sportsmen.
The trout make fatal snaps at the hook of adroit sportsmen and toss
their spotted brilliance into the game-basket. Already the baton of
the orchestral leader taps the music-stand on the hotel green, and
American life puts on festal array, and the rumbling of the tenpin
alley, and the crack of the ivory balls on the green-baized billiard
tables, and the jolting of the bar-room goblets, and the explosive
uncorking of champagne bottles, and the whirl and the rustle of the
ball-room dance, and the clattering hoofs of the race-courses, attest
that the season for the great American watering-places is fairly
inaugurated. Music--flute and drum and cornet-a-piston and clapping
cymbals--will wake the echoes of the mountains.

Glad I am that fagged-out American life for the most part will have an
opportunity to rest, and that nerves racked and destroyed will find a
Bethesda. I believe in watering-places. Let not the commercial firm
begrudge the clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient the
physician, or the church its pastor, a season of inoccupation. Luther
used to sport with his children; Edmund Burke used to caress his
favorite horse; Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hours of the church's
disruption, played kite for recreation--as I was told by his own
daughter--and the busy Christ said to the busy apostles: "Come ye
apart awhile into the desert and rest yourselves." And I have obs