quickly as they are completed. Your stage favorite, in the throes of a
post-lobster nightmare, has a horrid vision of herself "resting" in
January. But when he who sells goods on the road groans and tosses in
the clutches of a dreadful dream, it is, strangely enough, never of
canceled orders, maniacal train schedules, lumpy mattresses, or vilely
cooked food. These everyday things he accepts with a philosopher's
cheerfulness. No--his nightmare is always a vision of himself, sick on
the road, at a country hotel in the middle of a Spring season.

On the third day that she looked with more than ordinary indifference
upon hotel and dining-car food Mrs. Emma McChesney, representing the
T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, wondered if, perhaps, she
did not need a bottle of bitter tonic. On the fifth day she noticed
that there were chills chasing up and down her spine, and back and
forth from legs to shoulder-blades when other people were wiping their
chins and foreheads with bedraggled-looking handkerchiefs, and
demanding to know how long this heat was going to last, anyway. On the
sixth day she lost all interest in T. A. Buck's Featherloom
Petticoats. And then she knew that something was seriously wrong. On
the seventh day, when the blonde and nasal waitress approached her in
the dining-room of the little hotel at Glen Rock, Minnesota, Emma
McChesney's mind somehow failed to grasp the meaning of the all too
obvious string of questions which were put to her--questions ending in
the inevitable "Tea, coffee 'r milk?" At that juncture Emma McChesney
had looked up into the girl's face in a puzzled, uncomprehending way,
had passed one hand dazedly over her hot forehead, and replied, with
great earnestness:

"Yours of the twelfth at hand and contents noted ... the greatest
little skirt on the market ... he's going to be a son to be proud of,