g another one
instead?" I asked.

As you see, I wasn't as far gone as they thought I was.

"The gentleman pouring water through the funnel," continued the
physician in charge, "is a Wall Street broker broken down from
overwork."

I buttoned my coat.

Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah's arks,
ministers reading Darwin's "Theory of Evolution," lawyers sawing
wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered
sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and
a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.

"You look pretty strong," said the physician in charge to me. "I think
the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders
over the mountainside and then bringing them up again."

I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"The matter is," said I, "that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am
going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and
catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town."

"Well," said the doctor, "perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the
suitable place for you. But what you need is rest--absolute rest and
exercise."

That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: "What
I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one
of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it
up and down while I rest?"

The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced
sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man
came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the
west entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me
over.

"I thought you had 'em," he said, not unkindly, "but I guess you're
all right. You'd better go see a doctor, old man."

A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the
preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon.
And his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.

"What you need," he decided, "is sea air and companionship."

"Would a mermaid--" I began; but he slipped on his professional
manner.

"I myself," he said, "will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast
of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet,
comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate."

The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable h