"Can't you divide your mail between the two towns, and make them both third or fourth class or whatever-it-is postoffice towns?" I asked Barton, after he had given me the simple explanation of the whole affair. "No--for if I took anything away from Cottswold and added it to Andersonville, then the Cottswold authorities would become my adversaries, too ... the only thing I can do," he added, "is what I meant to do all along,--as soon as our 'city' has grown important enough--have 'Perfection City' made a postoffice." "And then make enemies of both towns at once?" He threw up his hands in despair and walked away. * * * * * Having quit work with the gang that was laying out the streets of the future city through the pines, I was entirely out of the few dollars my several weeks' work had enabled me to save ... though but little was needed to exist by, in that community of simple livers ... my procuring my tent free had rendered me quite independent.... One afternoon Barton met me on the dam-head. "Come on in swimming with me ... I have something to talk with you about," he said. We swam around and talked, as nonchalantly as two other men would have done, sitting in their club. "How would you like to work for me again?" "What is it you want me to work at?" "I need a cook for my nature restaurant ... can you cook?" I thought. I knew his present cook, MacGregor, the Scot, and I didn't want to do him out of a job. Besides, I didn't know how to cook. The first objection Barton read in my face. "MacGregor is quitting ... I'm not firing him." "All right ... I'll take the job." Our conference over, we had climbed out to the top of the dam, slid over, and were now standing beneath. The water galloped down in a snowy cataract of foam, as we topped off our swim with the heavy "shower-bath" that was like a massage in its pummelling. * * * * * MacGregor good-naturedly stayed an extra week, saying he'd show me the run of things. Secretly he tried to teach me how to cook.... As the cooking was not all of the "nature" order, but involved preparing food for a horde of people we called "outsiders" who were employed in Barton's publishing plant, I would have to prepare meat and bake bread and make tea and coffee.... Barton confessed to me that a food-compromise was distasteful to him. But he could not coerce. While lecturing about the country it was often, even with him, "eat beefsteaks or starve!" MacGregor was a professional Scotchman, just as there are professional Irishmen, Englishmen and professional Southern Gentlemen ... every Scotchman is a professional Scotchman ... but there is always something pleasant and poetic about his being so ... it is not as it is with the others--whose "professionalism" generally bears an unpleasant reek.