“I cannot say that I enjoyed my first and only family summer vacation. Think of four hundred wives wanting to be taken out rowing every day! Think of being required to affix wriggling angle-worms to four hundred separate and distinct fish-hooks! I need not enter into details. These samples are sufficient.
“It is enough to say that after the regular vacation period was over I was compelled, on the advice of my chief physician, to enter the Jerusalem Sanitarium and Rest Cure in order to recuperate. It was ‘never again’ for me.
“I hear there is some complaining today among married men over having to take their wives to the seashore or the mountains. But they should pause to consider that their experience, at worst, can be only one four-hundredth as strenuous and wearing as was mine. I remember the day we got back home to the palace in Jerusalem. Every last one of those wives was so glad to be back that she went up to her room and had what she called ‘a good cry.’”
“And what did you do, Your Majesty?”
“Oh, I went down cellar and took a smile.”
And, notwithstanding my citizenship in the dryest nation on earth, I felt that Solomon had richly earned that spirituous solace.
VI
BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE
“I’ve got a job for you that’s some assignment. You say you always have to suggest the subjects for these interviews with the shades. Well, here’s one for you that I thought of last night all by myself. Interview Collector Brigham Young on woman suffrage.”
“Collector Young? I can’t quite recall on the moment. Let’s see: what did he collect?”