“But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy’s summer vacation that wasn’t one.

“We was tired of finance and all the branches of unsanctified ingenuity.  Even Andy, whose brain rarely ever stopped working, began to make noises like a tennis cabinet.

“‘Heigh ho!’ says Andy.  ’I’m tired.  I’ve got that steam up the yacht Corsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling.  I want to loaf and indict my soul, as Walt Whittier says.  I want to play pinochle with Merry del Val or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or do a monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery and outside the line of routine and sand-bagging.’

“‘Patience,’ says I.  ’You’ll have to climb higher in the profession before you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of the great captains of industry.  Now, what I’d like, Andy,’ says I, ’would be a summer sojourn in a mountain village far from scenes of larceny, labor and overcapitalization.  I’m tired, too, and a month or so of sinlessness ought to leave us in good shape to begin again to take away the white man’s burdens in the fall.’

“Andy fell in with the rest cure at once, so we struck the general passenger agents of all the railroads for summer resort literature, and took a week to study out where we should go.  I reckon the first passenger agent in the world was that man Genesis.  But there wasn’t much competition in his day, and when he said:  ’The Lord made the earth in six days, and all very good,’ he hadn’t any idea to what extent the press agents of the summer hotels would plagiarize from him later on.

“When we finished the booklets we perceived, easy, that the United States from Passadumkeg, Maine, to El Paso, and from Skagway to Key West was a paradise of glorious mountain peaks, crystal lakes, new laid eggs, golf, girls, garages, cooling breezes, straw rides, open plumbing and tennis; and all within two hours’ ride.

“So me and Andy dumps the books out the back window and packs our trunk and takes the 6 o’clock Tortoise Flyer for Crow Knob, a kind of a dernier resort in the mountains on the line of Tennessee and North Carolina.

[Illustration:  “Dumps the books out of the back window.”]

“We was directed to a kind of private hotel called Woodchuck Inn, and thither me and Andy bent and almost broke our footsteps over the rocks and stumps.  The Inn set back from the road in a big grove of trees, and it looked fine with its broad porches and a lot of women in white dresses rocking in the shade.  The rest of Crow Knob was a post office and some scenery set an angle of forty-five degrees and a welkin.

“Well, sir, when we got to the gate who do you suppose comes down the walk to greet us?  Old Smoke-’em-out Smithers, who used to be the best open air painless dentist and electric liver pad faker in the Southwest.