To stay in town and keep one’s family there is a far from disagreeable experience except in very large cities in unusually hot weather. The custom of going away from home in summer is one which has grown by force of imitation. The inclination to change one’s surroundings, and to give the wife and children a whiff of country or sea or mountain air for a few weeks in the course of the year is an ambition which is neither godless nor extravagant. But it is not worth while to set this necessity up as an idol to be worshipped at the expense of comfort for the rest of the year, for, after all, our ancestors successfully reared large families of children, including some of us, without going away from home in the summer, and “the-can’t-get-aways” in our largest and most uncomfortable cities still outnumber those who can and do in the proportion of at least five to one. It costs more to go away than to stay in town; from which certain native philosophers, who maintain that any one who spends more than twenty-five hundred dollars on his family in any one year is not a good American, may argue that those who have both a summer and a winter home are aristocrats and materialists. Their argument is not likely to diminish summer travel, to bankrupt the summer hotels, or to induce the well-to-do American citizen to shut up his cottage. A change in summer, for a longer or shorter period, is generally recognized as one of the most healthful and improving advantages which a father in our civilization can give his family and himself. On the other hand, to go out of town simply because one’s neighbors do, when one cannot afford it, is a pitiful performance.