Finally all the household effects are piled out on the sidewalk, while the neighbors sit on their stoops and make remarks about the quantity and quality of your equipment. Of course, no furniture would look good under such circumstances. If the fittings of Buckingham Palace were piled up on the front lawn, they would hardly be impressive. And you are keenly conscious that your furniture has nothing on King George's. The only thing to do is to pretend that you don't see your neighbors while your sofas and chairs stand on their heads on the sidewalk, kicking their ancient legs in the air, and showing with painful frankness the places where they have been mended.
In the meantime, you keep travelling between the old house and the new one. As the pile keeps diminishing in front of your home that has been, it keeps growing in front of your home to be. There, too, the neighbors are on the watch, and as your old mattresses are carried in, bleeding excelsior from a dozen wounds, you can see their anticipations of your desirability as an addition to the society of the block going steadily down to below the freezing point.
At last the work is done. Everything you can think of has been piled up higgledy-piggledy at the new place. The family sits forlornly in the midst of it—camping out in a strange house!
"Where's the baby?" shrieks mother suddenly in the midst of the weary silence.
Then you remember that you left the little innocent in the bath-tub in the old house for safe keeping. As you tear madly off to retrieve him, you keep wondering if he has turned on the water and drowned himself.
And yet, the following spring, your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of still another move.
VACATION VAGARIES
Vacation Vagaries
Vacation is an excellent institution. Anything that makes a man so contented with his job and his ordinary lot in life as it does must be a good thing. After two weeks spent at the average summer resort the food at home or in the old boarding-house in the city seems rich and varied, and the work at the office proves an intellectual recreation.