ved at
full length in the verandah. When traffic is brisk three whole teams
will pass that verandah in one day, and it is necessary to exchange news
about the weather and the prospects for oats. When oats are in there
will be slack time on the farm, and the farmers will seriously think of
doing the hundred things that they have let slide during the summer.
They will undertake this and that, 'when they get around to it.' The
phrase translated is the exact equivalent to the _manana_ of the
Spaniard, the _kul hojaiga_ of Upper India, the _yuroshii_ of the
Japanese, and the long drawled _taihod_ of the Maori. The only person
who 'gets around' in this weather is the summer boarder--the refugee
from the burning cities of the Plain, and she is generally a woman. She
walks, and botanizes, and kodaks, and strips the bark off the white
birch to make blue-ribboned waste-paper baskets, and the farmer regards
her with wonder. More does he wonder still at the city clerk in a
blazer, who has two weeks' holiday in the year and, apparently,
unlimited money, which he earns in the easiest possible way by 'sitting
at a desk and writing,' The farmer's wife sees the fashions of the
summer boarder, and between them man and woman get a notion of the
beauties of city life for which their children may live to blame them.
The blazer and the town-made gown are innocent recruiting sergeants for
the city brigades; and since one man's profession is ever a mystery to
his fellow, blazer and gown believe that the farmer must be happy and
content. A summer resort is one of the thousand windows whence to watch
the thousand aspects of life in the Atlantic States. Remember that
between June and September it is the desire of all who can to get away
from the big cities--not on account of wantonness, as people leave
London--but because of actual heat. So they get away in their millions
with their millions--the wives of the rich men for five clear months,
the others for as long as they can; and, like drawing like, they make
communities set by set, breed by breed, division by division, over the
length and breadth of the land--from Maine and the upper reaches of the
Saguenay, through the mountains and hot springs of half-a-dozen
interior States, out and away to Sitka in steamers. Then they spend
money on hotel bills, among ten thousand farms, on private companies who
lease and stock land for sporting purposes, on yachts and canoes,
bicycles, rods, chalets, cottage