“You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me.  “I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”

I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy.  So I am going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right.  This seems hardly the suitable place for you.  But what you need is rest—­absolute rest and exercise.”

That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk:  “What I need is absolute rest and exercise.  Can you give me a room with one of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up and down while I rest?”

The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby.  That man came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west entrance.  I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over.

“I thought you had ’em,” he said, not unkindly, “but I guess you’re all right.  You’d better go see a doctor, old man.”

A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the preliminary stimulant.  He looked to me a little less like Napoleon.  And his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.

“What you need,” he decided, “is sea air and companionship.”

“Would a mermaid—­” I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.

“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast of Long Island and see that you get in good shape.  It is a quiet, comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”

The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry on an island off the main shore.  Everybody who did not dress for dinner was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and champagne table d’hote.  The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy yachtsmen.  The Corsair anchored there the day we arrived.  I saw Mr. Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly at the hotel.  Still, it was a very inexpensive place.  Nobody could afford to pay their prices.  When you went away you simply left your baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.

When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for get-away money.  My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf links and went to sleep on the lawn.

When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly.  “By the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”

“Relieved of very much,” I replied.