Houses are only meant to eat and sleep in.  The rest of life is lived 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, cottages, reading circles, camps, tents, and all the luxuries they know.  But the luxury of rest most of them do not know; and the telephone and telegraph are faithfully dragged after them, lest their men-folk should for a moment forget the ball and chain at foot.

For sadness with laughter at bottom there are few things to compare with the sight of a coat-less, muddy-booted, millionaire, his hat adorned with trout-flies, and a string of small fish in his hand, clawing wildly at the telephone of some back-of-beyond ‘health resort.’  Thus: