n New York is the most fascinating business in the world.
Why, it seems as if you New York men actually struggle to get spare
time. I've sat in your office and watched you on Saturday morning
working yourself into a blue haze in your efforts to get done early
enough to cord up a fine big mess of leisure on Saturday afternoon.
That's the difference between New York and Homeburg. In Homeburg you
would have been stretching out your job to last until supper
time--unless you were one of our nineteen golfers, or the roads were
good enough to let you drive over to the baseball game at Paynesville.

Leisure in New York means pleasure, excitement, and seven dozen kinds of
interest. But for many and many a long year in hundreds of Homeburg
homes, leisure has meant waiting for meal times--and not much of
anything else.

City people laugh at country people for beating the chickens to roost.
But what are you going to do when going to bed is the most fascinating
diversion available after supper? I've noticed that as fast as a small
town man discovers something else to do in the evening, his light bill
goes up and up. When crokinole was introduced into Homeburg twenty odd
years ago, the kerosene wagon had to make an extra mid-week trip. When
the magazines came down from thirty-five cents to ten and you could get
three of them and a set of books for one dollar down and a dollar a
month until death did you part, they had to put an operator in the
telephone exchange after 8 P.M. because of the general sleeplessness.
When the automobile came, and when two moving picture theaters, a
Chautauqua, and a Lyceum course opened fire in one year, and the
business men fitted up a club with an ancient pool table in it, Homeburg
got chummy with all the evening hours, and kicked so hard about the
electric lights going off at midnight that the company had to run them
an hour longer. And I suppose if any invader ever puts in an all-night
restaurant where you can have lobster and a soubrette on the table at
the same time, a certain proportion of us will get as foolish as you are
and will forget how to go to bed at all by artificial light.

We've changed that much from the past generation. We know what to do
with leisure in the evening. But we're still awkward and embarrassed
when we meet it by daylight. Since we have built our Country Club, a few
of us have learned to enjoy ourselves in a fitful and guilty fashion
late in the afternoon. But as a rule,