THE RESORTER.
A friend who was on the car, on the way up town, after a day’s work, with a clean shirt on, a white vest and a general look of coolness, accosted the traveler as follows:
“Been summer resorting, I hear?”
The dirty-looking man crossed his legs with a painful effort, as though his drawers stuck to his legs and almost peeled the back off, and answered:
“Yes, I have been out two weeks. I have struck ten different hotels, and if you ever hear of my leaving town again during the hot weather, you can take my head for a soft thing,” and he wiped a cinder out of his eye with what was once a clean handkerchief.
“Had a good, cool time, I suppose, and enjoyed yourself,” said the man who had not been out of town.
“Cool time, hell,” said the man, who has a pew in two churches, as he kicked his limp satchel of dirty clothes under the car seat. “I had rather been sentenced to the House of Correction for a month.”
“Why, what’s the trouble?”
“Well, there is no trouble, for people who like that kind of fun, but this lets me out. I do not blame people who live in Southern States for coming North, because they enjoy things as a luxury that we who live in Wisconsin have as a regular diet, but for a Chicago or Milwaukee man to go into the country to swelter and be kept awake nights is bald lunancy. Why, since I have been out I have slept in a room a size smaller than the closet my wife keeps her linen in, with one window that brought in air from a laundry, and I slept on a cot that shut up like a jack-knife and always caught me in the hinge where it hurt.
“At another hotel, I had a broken-handled pitcher of water that had been used to rinse clothes in, and I can show you the indigo on my neck. I had a piece of soap that smelled like a tannery, and if the towel was not a recent damp diaper than I have never raised six children.