f the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can
he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he
cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished
mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which
we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon,
it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare.

VIII

THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA

At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country,
eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it
becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the
city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either
moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain
interest.

Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after
forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each
hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea,
sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if
not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as
encyclopaedic.

The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in
the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip
to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those
simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of
pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no
longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of
three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo
and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they
can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the
earliest of the eighteen-seventies.

After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to
Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such
an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every
Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there
had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom
the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised
with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the
house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left
only the cook