ow you really do need
a vacation."

Her father looked down at her, saw the moisture, and surrendered.

"You're a humbug," he said; "and this vacation business is another. A
man spends two or three months loafing around because somebody tells him
he's looking badly and ought to take a rest; and before he knows it,
he's accumulated so much rust in his system that he never gets it all
out again. His machinery creaks more or less for the rest of his life.
The wise man postpones his vacation to the next world."

"Well, let's call it a jaunt," suggested Susie. "A jaunt somehow implies
hurry and bustle, with plenty of exercise."

"And I don't know which is the bigger fool," pursued her father, not
heeding her; "the fellow who takes a vacation every year on his own
hook, or the one who permits his daughters to drag him away from his
comfortable home and his morning paper and the business which gives him
his interest in life, and maroon him in a desert of a Dutch
watering-place, where there's absolutely nothing for a self-respecting
man to do but smoke himself to death and wait for a paper which never
comes till day after to-morrow!"

"It sounds terribly involved, but I'll help you reason it out, dad, any
time you like," said Susie, obligingly. "And you'll stay, won't you,
dear?"

"Oh, I'll stay, since your heart's so set upon it. I'll try to bear up
and find a diversion of some kind and not rust out any more than I can
help. I might dig in the sand or make mud pies or play mumbly-peg. But I
draw the line at plunging into that whirlpool across the street. My bed
here is nearly as comfortable as the one at home, and the grub's
first-rate."

"Very well, dad," agreed Susie, instantly seizing the concession, but
speaking as though it were she who was making it, "we'll stay here,
then. Only I _do_ wish there were a few more people," she added, with a
sigh. "I hate to sit down in that big, empty dining-room. I imagine I'm
at an Egyptian banquet, and that there are horrid, rattly skeletons
sitting in all those high, covered chairs."

"What you need is some fresh air," said her father. "You girls get your
hats and go for a walk. You're growing morbid. If you think of skeletons
again, I'll give you a liver pill."

"Won't you come, dad?"

"No; you know you don't want me. Besides, I see the panjandrum who
brings the mail coming up the dyke down yonder."

He stood gazing down the Digue until his womenkind reappeared, bedight,