In the dining-hall I met my fellow waiters and waitresses: college students, all of them, from different parts of the country. The orchestra, at dinner, played complimentary college tunes in our honor: our guests broke down all perfunctory relations and intimately entered into our ambitions. While waiting for the arrival of guests at breakfast the waiters stood under a wooden canopy in the hotel yard and ironed napkins and towels. Of course neither Thropper nor I were very expert in the laundry, but that did not excuse us from it. One day the Irishwoman, who was proprietor of the hotel, came and investigated the laundry. She paid particular attention to the manner in which I conducted the flat-iron over the towels. After watching me for some moments, during which, for a woman, she maintained a severe and terrible silence, during which perspiration poured down my face, she suddenly exploded with laughter and said: “Ah, ah! You should see Mister Priddy use his iron. It’s a rale treat. He is that gentle on the cloths! I want you all to come around and take a lesson. You girls now,” she indicated some of the college girls, “have been doing it wrong all the time!” She laughed loudly, as they gathered about my board. Taking the iron gingerly in her massive, red, and scarred hand, the Irishwoman very gently tipped the back edge of it on a towel and deliberately, though exactly, drew the iron backward several times, lifting it from the board to carry it forward. “That’s the way Mr. Priddy says you ought to iron!” she shouted, her burly face reddening with merriment, as she noticed my chagrin. “It’s backwards and not forwards that you should iron, all of ye!” and then she sat down on a bench in the midst of a most industrious crowd of laughing boys and girls. After the fun, she took the iron in hand in an endeavor to show me the true, laundry method of using a flat-iron. All the tricks, the horse-plays, the trivial but welcome expressions of fun that crowd themselves into a college life, were indulged at the hotel by the waiters and waitresses. A group of Michigan students lived in a long, loosely-built shanty in the yard, on the doors of which they had painted its name: “Lover’s Roost,” and the better to carry out the fancy of its being a roost, the boys were in the habit of receiving expected visitors, who came to inspect their quarters, perched on the upper beams, above the partitions, flapping their hands and crowing like lusty, gigantic roosters! The season rushed past in its merry whirl. Tired muscles relaxed, taut nerves slacked, weary bodies gained repose, there on the sand dunes, amid parties, fêtes, musicales, and picnics. The first chill winds from the lake wafted hordes of people back to work, and soon left the hotel nearly unpeopled.