months, with affluent golf
maniacs, for whom two fine courses have been laid out.

When the pipes supplying water for the greens of his home course, at
Brook, Indiana, freeze, annually, George Ade, for instance, knows that,
instead of hibernating, it is time for him to take his white flannel
suits, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard until the fragrance
of the moth-ball has departed, pack them in his wardrobe trunk, and take
his winter flight to the Belleview. He knows that, at the Belleview, he
will meet hundreds of men and women who are suffering from the malady
with which he is afflicted.

The conversation at Belleair is, so far as my companion and I could
learn, confined entirely to comparisons between different courses,
different kinds of clubs and balls, and different scores. Belleair turns
up its nose at Palm Beach. It considers the game of golf as played at
Palm Beach a trifling game, and it feels that the winter population of
Palm Beach wastes a lot of time talking about clothes and the stock
market when it might be discussing cleeks, midirons, and mashies. The
woman who thinks it essential to be blond whether she is blond or not,
and who regards Forty-second Street as the axle upon which the universe
turns, would be likely to die of ennui in a week at Belleair, whereas,
in Palm Beach, if she died in that time, it would probably be of
delight--with a possibility of alcoholism as a contributing cause. And
likewise, though Belleair has plutocrats in abundance, they are not
starred for their wealth, as are the Palm Beach millionaires, nor yet
for their social position, but are rated strictly according to their
club handicap. Hence it happens that if, speaking of a Palm Beach
millionaire, you ask: "How did he make it?" you will be told the story
of some combine of trusts, some political grafting, or some widely
advertised patent medicine; but if you ask in Belleair: "How did he make
it?" the answer is likely to be: "He made it in 4, with a cleek."

Consider on the other hand, St. Petersburg, with its cheap hotels, its
boarding houses, its lunch rooms and cafeterias, and its winter
population of farmers and their wives from the North. The people you see
in St. Petersburg are identical with those you might see on market day
in a county town of Ohio or Indiana. Several thousands of them come
annually from several dozen States, and many a family of them lives
through the winter comfortably on less than som