# A Summer Resort

Extracted from The Smart Set magazine, Vol 13, May–Aug 1904, pp. 69–70.
A SUMMER RESORT
A SUMMER resort is a place where dressmakers display their goods.
The proper ingredients of a Summer resort are a blond beach, a delicate, rheumatic hotel, about one thousand victims and plenty of hot air. Summer resorts were originally invented for giving people a rest. Now their principal purpose is to make everybody tired.
In all well-regulated Summer resorts, the food is prepared in a blacksmith's forge located in the rear of the hotel, and served to the guests in porcelain capsules three times a day, whether they want it or not.
The officials of the Summer resort consist of the proprietor, or head bunco-steerer; the clerk, or assistant bunco-steerer; the head-waiter, or chief robber, and the common waiter, or ordinary highwayman.
The proprietor has the best room in the house, which commands a fine view of the ocean and the baggage of the guests. He notes the new and strong arrivals, and mourns over those who are too weak to remain any longer. He shakes hands with all the millionaires and gives the haughty glance to the dry-goods clerk unaccompanied by a chaperon.
The nearest approach that any Summer resort comes to diamond-backed terrapin in the kitchen is a diamond-fronted clerk in the office.
It is the clerk's duty to read and sort all the guests' mail, carefully putting the cash received into the surplus. Coming as he always does from one of the oldest families of Harlem or East St. Louis, he is naturally superior to all the guests, and conceals it with difficulty. His manners are usually a cross between a custom-house officer and a Weber & Fields star, and he always hands you the pen with the third finger of the right hand upon which rests a superb Koh-i-nur that has had yellow fever.
The head-waiter sweeps the air for you as you enter the dining-room, and takes what you have left. If you are poor and of humble descent, wear ready-made clothes and a look of anxiety, he seats you between an undertaker and a grandmother in the mourner's row. If you look like a horse owner, or a cotton king, he plunges you into the bevy of heiresses who sit at the star table. Then the ordinary waiter places around you a variety of dishes, faintly discernible with the naked eye on a clear day, which remind you so much of real food that you begin to feel hungry.
The principal products raised by Summer resorts are money and flies. Quite a wide gulf separates the two, however, as your money is leaving you all the time, but the flies never leave you at all.
In the beginning of the season a regiment of flies is stationed in each room, with instructions to give no quarter.
Some Summer resorts, having found that the flies will sometimes desert the rooms, put in screens, so that they cannot get away.
The early-morning fly at the Summer resort, who finds insufficient nourishment in the body of his emaciated victim, will often become desperate by hunger and swallow all the towels in the room.
Children exist in great numbers in Summer resorts, for some unknown reason these places being supposed to be good for the final recovery from measles, mumps, scarlet fever and other popular diseases. They romp in the corridors while you take your afternoon nap, and thoughtfully wake you up early enough in the morning to take the business man's train for town when you have foolishly planned to pound your adamantine mattress for another hour.
The only things that are not allowed at a Summer resort are dogs. But it isn't definitely known whether this is a wise provision of Providence or the SPCA
Tom Masson.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1934, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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