The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-09-03
BEFORE AND AFTER.
HERE IS ONE MAN WHO EXPEC-
 TED
The Worst Vacation in Every way and
 Got It,

The man in the rear seat of the open car gave vent to dry chuckle.
 Well, let's have it," said his com panion, when the chuckling had be- come a bit monotonous
 I'm laughing at the difference be- tween anticipation and realization" said the chuckler. "You know I've just got back from two weeks vacation in the country"
 "Uh-huh."
 Well, had all sorts of evil anticipa- ton when I started for the country-it was the first time I'd ever made up my mind to vacationize in the country in my life. Wanted to try it out, anyway, although my mind was full of what I'd always been reading in the funny pa- pers about summer boarding places in the country. So really went prepared to find the conditions just as the hu morous publications portrayed them. Expected to sleep on mattress so thin that I'd be able to feel the slats, in the first place, and felt positive that my room d be up in the sloping attic, where the sun would shine in fiercely at five o'clock in the morning, and the blue bottle flies 'ud buzz around, and all that. Had a perfect picture in my mind, before started of the furniture of that room. Knew in advance that there'd be only an old rickety wash stand, with a scraped porcelain pitcher and bowl. one uncertain chair covered with hot-looking horsehair, and one of those wretched obling looking-glas that make ones face look like Brown ie's. Felt positive that in entering that room in the attic after dark I'd scrape my head against the sloping ceiling and get my front hair covered with kalso- mine
 Then I knew that there's be nothing but canned truck to eat The funny papers had always informed me that all of the country produce is sent to the city, and that therefore summer board CTS are invariably compelled to put up with timed grub, supplemented by the | fer6ciously tough meat, grass-fed, | that's slaughtered in the country, and eggs that had been packed in lime over winter. I knew that, as all of the good | milk had to be sent to the city to pass
 the milk inspectors, the only milk I'd get in the country would be that pale,
 bluish, watery-looking stuff-hadn't been seeing pictures of crafty-looking
 proprietors of summer boarding houses in the country pumping water into the
 milk for their guests all my life In the comic papers?
 "Of course. knew that the bathing would consist of the fodest watering | trough for the stock, and that the fish ing would be of the tadpole variety in
 the 'crick about four miles away over a scorching. dusty road. I was pre- | pared to find 1t sizzling, searinly, hot, with never a breath of air to so much as
 stir the burnt-looking foliage of the trees, I knew that the wide verandas'
 would consist of a measly little four by eight porch in the front of the weather
 boarded house, and at night the malaria
 could be just seen with the. naked eye rising in the mists encircling the house.
 q was convinced that the agreeable { society would consist of the foxy-eyed l old farmer and his worn wife and scrag- gy daughters, not to mention three or
 four revenous hired men. and that the
 music would be furnished by one of the aforesaid daughters on Sunday ! nights, in the shape of doleful hymns
 wrung from a wheezy old ante-bellum
 parlor organ.
 "There was no doubt in my mind that