In the summer you say to your good health:  “Good-bye, I am going to have a good time for a little while.  I will be very glad to see you again in the autumn.”  Then in the autumn, when you are hard at work in your office, or store, or shop, or counting-room, Good Health will come and say:  “Good-bye, I am going.”  You say:  “Where are you going?” “Oh,” says Good Health, “I am going to take a vacation!” It is a poor rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you choleric and splenetic and exhausted.  You coquetted with your good health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you in the winter-time.  A fragment of Paul’s charge to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every watering-place:  “Do thyself no harm.”

IV.  Another temptation hovering around the watering-place is to the formation of hasty and life-long alliances.  The watering-places are responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country than all the other things combined.  Society is so artificial there that no sure judgment of character can be formed.  Those who form companionships amid such circumstances go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to one prize.  In the severe tug of life you want more than glitter and splash.  Life is not a ball-room where the music decides the step, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail can make up for strong common sense.  You might as well go among the gayly painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go among the light spray of the summer watering-place to find character that can stand the test of the great struggle of human life.  Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a lace fan or a croquet mallet!  The load of life is so heavy that in order to draw it, you want a team stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper and a feminine butterfly.

If there is any man in the community that excites my contempt, and that ought to excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the soft-handed, soft-headed fop, who, perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his summer in taking killing attitudes, and waving sentimental adieus, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid-glove.  Boots as tight as an Inquisition, two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat, his conversation made up of “Ah’s” and “Oh’s” and “He-hee’s.”  It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calves-foot jelly.  There is only one counterpart to such a man as that, and that is the frothy young woman at the watering-place, her conversation made up of French moonshine; what she has on her head only equaled by what she has on her back; useless ever since she was born, and to be useless until she is dead:  and what they will do with her in the next world I do not know, except to set her upon the banks of the River Life for eternity to look sweet!  God intends us to admire music and fair faces and graceful step, but amid the heartlessness and the inflation and the fantastic influences of our modern watering-places, beware how you make life-long covenants!