going to
have a good time for a little while. I will be very glad to see you
again in the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are hard at work in
your office, or store, or shop, or counting-room, Good Health will
come and say: "Good-bye, I am going." You say: "Where are you going?"
"Oh," says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation!" It is a poor
rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you
choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You coquetted with your good
health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you
in the winter-time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the jailer would be
an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every
watering-place: "Do thyself no harm."

IV. Another temptation hovering around the watering-place is to the
formation of hasty and life-long alliances. The watering-places are
responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country than
all the other things combined. Society is so artificial there that no
sure judgment of character can be formed. Those who form
companionships amid such circumstances go into a lottery where there
are twenty blanks to one prize. In the severe tug of life you want
more than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball-room where the music
decides the step, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail
can make up for strong common sense. You might as well go among the
gayly painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go
among the light spray of the summer watering-place to find character
that can stand the test of the great struggle of human life. Ah, in
the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a lace fan or a
croquet mallet! The load of life is so heavy that in order to draw it,
you want a team stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper
and a feminine butterfly.

If there is any man in the community that excites my contempt, and
that ought to excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the
soft-handed, soft-headed fop, who, perfumed until the air is actually
sick, spends his summer in taking killing attitudes, and waving
sentimental adieus, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and finding
his heaven in the set of a lavender kid-glove. Boots as tight as an
Inquisition, two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a
flaming cravat, his conversation made up of "Ah's" and "Oh's" and
"He-hee's." It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a