never ceased planning. Our difficulty was that having been brought
up at Fairport, which is on the Sound, north of New London, I was
homesick for a smell of salt marshes and for the sight of water and
ships. Though they were only schooners carrying cement, I wanted
to sit in the sun on the string-piece of a wharf and watch them. I
wanted to beat about the harbor in a catboat, and feel the tug and
pull of the tiller. Kinney protested that that was no way to spend
a vacation or to invite adventure. His face was set against
Fairport. The conversation of clam-diggers, he said, did not
appeal to him; and he complained that at Fairport our only chance
of adventure would be my capsizing the catboat or robbing a
lobster-pot. He insisted we should go to the mountains, where we
would meet what he always calls "our best people." In September,
he explained, everybody goes to the mountains to recuperate after
the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore. To this I objected
that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw's basement
dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety. And so,
along these lines, throughout the sleepless, sultry nights of June,
July, and August, we fought it out. There was not a summer resort
within five hundred miles of New York City we did not consider.
From the information bureaus and passenger agents of every railroad
leaving New York, Kinney procured a library of timetables, maps,
folders, and pamphlets, illustrated with the most attractive
pictures of summer hotels, golf links, tennis courts, and boat-
houses. For two months he carried on a correspondence with the
proprietors of these hotels; and in comparing the different prices
they asked him for suites of rooms and sun parlors derived constant
satisfaction.

"The Outlook House," he would announce, "wants twenty-four dollars