member much of what they are
told about children; but any man knows the difference between an aunt
and a mother-in-law.

"But don't you think they're nice people?" asked my wife.

"Oh, certainly," I replied. "Only they seem to be a little mixed up
about their children."

"That isn't a nice thing to say," returned my wife. I could not deny
it.

* * * * *

And yet, the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated
themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their natural,
pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social certainty, that they
were "nice" people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat
tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old,
with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was "nice" in all her pretty
clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness which
outwears most other types--the prettiness that lies in a rounded
figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth and black eyes.
She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier
than she was at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.

And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus's
summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had
come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the
precious days of idleness with the company gathered around the Jacobus
board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Tabb
and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton,
Pa.--out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated head-bookkeeper and his
prim and censorious wife--out of old Major Halkit, a retired business
man, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for
circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce
every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those
dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided
that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus's biscuit,
light as Aurora's cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the
perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and
decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered
out to take our morning glance at what we called "our view"; and it
seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses
could not drive us away in a year.

I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited