V
KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP
“My wife has just told me where we are going to spend my summer vacation,” remarked the city editor. “It’s been said that nothing is absolutely certain in this world, but it’s as sure as anything can be that I’m going to spend my three weeks just where the missus tells me. We never have any discussion on the subject at our house—none of that mountains or seashore business George Ade wrote about, ending in a compromise on the wife’s favorite mountains. But it’s always a relief when the suspense is over and the annual announcement by friend wife is made.
“And that reminds me; how about an interview with one of the shades on the modern vacation, summer resorts and all that sort of thing? Got anybody in mind for it? Noah? No, that trip of his was no summer vacation picnic. Suppose you ask Solomon how he managed the annual vacation business with all those wives of his. They tell me he was the wisest man that ever lived, and I’ll say he needed to be?”
I was gratified to find the shade of the former monarch and much-married man not at all averse to talking for publication. “You see,” he observed with an apologetic smile, “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk without being interrupted. It’s quite refreshing to have an appreciative, interested listener. Fortunately you have come on the very day when the Wives and Daughters of Solomon Association is holding its annual convention, and the mothers-in-law also are attending in their capacity of honorary members. They haven’t the privilege of voting—only of speaking from the floor—but that’s quite satisfactory. They don’t care where they speak from so long as they speak.
“And so, as I have said, we can have a cozy little chat. What did you want me to talk about? Summer vacations? My boy, I could tell you things about the trips I have taken in my capacity as a multiple husband that would dissuade you from matrimony ever after. But I do not wish to relate all the harrowing details. I’ll just give you a hint.
“Well, to start at the beginning, during the first few years of my married life the summer vacation germ spared our happy home. But as I gradually added more wives to my collection, an agitation was begun to get me to take them away somewhere for the summer. The wives began to find fault with the Jerusalem climate.
“They started to criticise what they called the stuffy little rooms of the royal palace. They suggested that other families were closing their houses, or renting them furnished for the summer, and going to the shore of the Mediterranean, where resorts had sprung up that advertised paradoxically cool breezes and a hot old time. They made life so miserable for me that finally one day, after a committee of wives had presented the subject and threatened that they would all go away to Mediterranean City on their own hook if I didn’t consent, I yielded.
“And then ensued such a season of preparation as I hope I shall never have to go through again. Four hundred new trunks bought, four hundred new summer outfits ordered. The palace as if by magic became filled with seamstresses and fitters and millinery architects and all sorts of strange women I had never seen before. You couldn’t walk down the front stairs without stumbling over a seamstress or two.
“The parlor, the living room, the library, all seemed full of sewing societies. Perfect strangers thronged the halls, their mouths full of pins, and tape measures hung around their necks.