II

“Well,” I says, “I didn’t ask him his first name, but he’s from St. Louis, so I suppose it’s Ludwig or Heinie.”

“Oh,” she says, disgusted. “I thought you meant one o’ the real ones.”

“He’s a real one, all right,” says I. “He’s so classy that he’s passed up Palm Beach. He says it’s gettin’ too common.”

“I don’t believe it,” says the Wife. “And besides, we don’t have to mix up with everybody.”

“He says they butt right in on you,” I told her.

“They’ll get a cold reception from me,” she says.

But between the curves and the fear o’ Palm Beach not bein’ so exclusive as it used to be, she couldn’t eat no supper, and I had another big meal.

The next mornin’ we landed in Jacksonville three hours behind time and narrowly missed connections for St. Augustine by over an hour and a half. They wasn’t another train till one-thirty in the afternoon, so we had some time to kill. I went shoppin’ and bought a shave and five or six rickeys. The Wife helped herself to a chair in the writin’ room of one o’ the hotels and told pretty near everybody in Chicago that she wished they was along with us, accompanied by a pitcher o’ the Elks’ Home or the Germania Club, or Trout Fishin’ at Atlantic Beach.

W’ile I was gettin’ my dime’s worth in the tonsorial parlors, I happened to look up at a calendar on the wall, and noticed it was the twelfth o’ February.

“How does it come that everything’s open here today?” I says to the barber. “Don’t you-all know it’s Lincoln’s birthday?”

“Is that so?” he says. “How old is he?”