Our town up home is a peach of a little town, anyway.
Say, I just feel as if I'd like to take my satchel and
jump clean out of that window. It would be a good rebuke
to them.
But, pshaw! what would _they_ care?
XII. This Strenuous Age
Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world
in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being
"speeded up." There is "efficiency" in the air. Offices
open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president
has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy
in a glass of peptonized milk than in--something else,
I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel
out of it.
My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after
midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on
porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost
on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep
breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.
This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain,
just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and
humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind.
Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least,
is what it is called now.
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