“The move was made during the summer, and when I opened up in the autumn I had such crowds afternoons and evenings that I had to put extra tables in the halls until I could get a room on the second floor ready.  At present I have two entire floors and often have so many waiting that it is next to impossible to pass through the entrance hall.

“Three summers ago I opened a second tea room at a seashore resort on the New England coast.  I heard of the place through a classmate whose family owned a cottage down there.  She described it as deadly dull, because there was nothing to do but bathe and boat unless you were the happy possessor of an automobile or a horse.

“I was so much interested in her description of the place that I went down one warm day in April and looked things over.  I found a stretch of about three miles of beach lined with well appearing and handsome cottages and not a single place of amusement.  The village behind the beach is a lovely old place, with twenty or more handsome old homes surrounded by grand trees.  There are two or three small stores, a post office, two liveries and the railroad station half a mile away.

“Before I left that afternoon I had paid the first month’s rent on the best of the only two cottages to be rented on the beach.  Of course it needed considerable fixing up and that had to be done at my own expense, but as I was getting it at a rental of $200 for the season I was not worried at the outlay.  The cottages told me enough of the character of the people who summered on that beach to make me sure that I would get good interest on all the money spent.

“Immediately after commencement I shut up my college tea rooms, leaving only the kitchen and storeroom open and in charge of an experienced woman with instructions to get more help when putting up preserves and pickles made it necessary.  Then I moved.

“The two first days on the beach my tea room didn’t have a visitor.  People strolled by and stared at the sign, but nobody came in to try my tea.  The third day I had a call from my landlord, who informed me that he had been misled into letting me have his cottage, and offering to return the amount paid for the first month’s rent, he very politely requested me to move out.

“After considerable talking I discovered that the cottagers didn’t like the way my waitresses dressed.  They were too stylish and my rooms appeared from the outside to be so brilliantly lighted that they thought I intended to sell liquor.

“I didn’t accept the offered rent, neither did I agree to move out, but I did assure my landlord that I would go the very day anything really objectionable happened on my premises.  I told him of my success in the college town and then invited him to bring his family the following afternoon to try my tea.

“Well, they came, they saw, and I conquered.  That evening all the tables on my piazza were filled and there was a slight sprinkling indoors.  A few days later the classmate who had told me of the place came down for the summer and my troubles were at an end.