The first American King

“‘His name?’ he asked.”
BY George Gordon Hastings
1905 The Smart Set Publishing Company LONDON NEW YORK
COPYRIGHTED 1904, by THE SMART SET PUBLISHING CO. New Edition, February, 1905.
The establishment of Dr. James Belden was pleasantly situated upon the southern shore of Long Island, some ninety odd miles from the city. The spacious house was fitted with every modern convenience and comfort, and stood in extensive, well-wooded private grounds. There were good fishing and boating to be had and the white, well-kept Long Island roads afforded excellent facilities alike for riding and driving.
The establishment was in reality a cross between a sanatorium and a physical culture resort. The doctor-proprietor carefully examined each person upon arrival and kept his directing eye upon him during his stay. He prescribed the diet and the exercise suited to each case and saw to it personally that his instructions were carried out. Many a wreck of the city’s storm and stress had the Doctor sent back to the metropolis renovated and renewed, and many were the haggard devotees of late hours and city dissipation who had returned, after a sojourn at the retreat, with vigor in their limbs and the hue of health in their cheeks. In a word, the Doctor was a philanthropist, at a hundred a week, who extended a haven of rest for human wrecks and turned them out again on the high seas of life staunchly refitted to renew the struggle. The Doctor himself, in fact, often referred to his establishment as a haven of refuge, which nautical expression was, perhaps, not inapt, inasmuch as the harbor in question was not infrequently visited, in popular parlance, by “swells” and “high-rollers.”
Dr. Belden himself was an exceedingly genial person, who well knew how to keep his various guests amused and in good humor with themselves and the world in general. The one subject which disturbed the Doctor’s equanimity was the presence in the neighborhood of a recently established private asylum for the insane maintained by a Dr. Weldon. The similarity between the names Weldon and Belden had led upon certain occasions to various distressing and distinctly embarrassing mistakes. Thus, when distinguished visitors had at times mentioned that they were staying at Dr. Belden’s establishment, rustics of the neighboring villages had been known to tap their heads significantly and adopt either attitudes of alarm, or patronizing airs, as the case might be. While little Reggie Smithers had been sojourning at Dr. Belden’s the rumor had been circulated at his club that he was incarcerated in an asylum for lunatics and a friendly wag had written him a letter of condolence, in which he took occasion to remark parenthetically that he had always entertained an innate conviction that Reggie would eventually so wind up, at which Reggie had been exceedingly wroth and had felt impelled to cut short his stay and return as quickly as possible to the city, so as to give the lie to the rumor.