and have come up here for a few weeks or a few days of well-earned repose.
They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors, and
clergymen and merchants, and brokers and bankers. There's hardly any
calling you Won't find represented among them. As I was thinking
just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic."

"I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your
intelligence in making my observations of your life under such
advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might
penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your
national joke, without stirring beyond the piazza of your hospitable
hotel," said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a
compliment like that to one's intelligence, and I said I should be very
happy to be of use to him. He thanked me, and said: "Then, to begin with,
I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all
overworked."

"Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and
our professional men work. I suppose there is nothing like it anywhere
else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that we
cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one
end out for a little while every summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks
of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind and
body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the
tremendous strain, and every country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics."
I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we
Americans are proud of overworking ourselves; Heaven knows why.

The Altrurian murmured: "Awful! Shocking!" But I thought somehow he had
not really followed me very attentively in my celebration of our national