United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He didn't want to take her to a reg'lar consumptive community, he said, an' so he was lookin' for a quiet place where she wouldn't be associatin' with lungers all the time. Some big doctor in New York told him to come up here an' look around. That was his business, Mr. Barnes, an' I guess you'd call it respectable, wouldn't you?" "Perfectly.
Why, that would be just the place, he declared. Dry as a bone, the weather was most of the year; hot the lungers liked it hot and dry, he knew. And when it was cold, it was sure bracing, too. Why, the country was alive with health-seekers. At that, most of 'em got well them that didn't come too late. That last sentence threw Peter into a panic.
One side of the corral was a high wall, and in the enclosure on the other side of the wall were the lung patients. One afternoon I saw a young Canadian boy looking wistfully through the gate, and I went over and spoke to him. He was the only one who could speak English among the "lungers." The others were Russians, French, and Belgians. The boy was dying of loneliness as well as consumption.
Consumptives were as thick as English sparrows in Colorado and I saw ample evidences of the disease in all its horrible details. It seemed that there was a sort of caste among the "lungers," depending mainly upon their amount of ready cash. Some had plain "consumption," while others had only "tuberculosis." Many had "lung trouble," "catarrh," "bronchitis," and "neurasthenia."
"Some folks turns lungers away," commented the host reflectively, "but that's only in the summertime when the vacation boarders kicks on 'em. As for me, I don't take in boarders summer nor winter, but when the snow drives a man in I don't drive him out." "So they accept us in the winter, do they, and cast us out in the summer when the ribbon-clerks come?"
Now, as they are still goin' to be too early for the season on the coast, Monsieur Blauring has conceived in his fertile brain the idea that it will be an interestin' and inexpensive thing for him to sidetrack his whole rodeo for a few weeks up in the Sacramentos, at the Sky Top hotel, that new railroad health resort some Yankees have just built, for lungers and other folks that have money and no pleasure in livin'."
She gazed as one hypnotized into the starry brightness of the black sky as she could see it through the window beside her. How ominously dark it was. Softly she slipped out of bed and lowered the flaps of the window. She did not like that darkness. After the storm, David had insisted the windows must be opened again, that was the first law of lungers and chasers.
The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern California has been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle West and is Eastern in character and feeling. Almost has the Californian developed a racial physiology. He tends to size, to smooth symmetry of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage; and the beauty of his women is not a myth.
So I come out to look after her." "Did she die?" "Not she. Get it out of your head that lungers always die they don't. She got well and went home and nagged the life out of her family for years. Last I heard of her, she'd taken up with a young fellow she met at a skating rink and her folks were wild for fear she'd marry him." "Then you stayed out West?" "Yes, and sometimes I've regretted it.
Buy a ticket for $29.50 and breathe the Elixir of Life while you look over our unequalled proposition." "That ought to catch all the lungers in the world," averred Mudge.
Word Of The Day