within the reservation to accommodate
those who preferred to pay for pleasanter surroundings or for private
treatment. The village became a town and the town a city.
Boarding-houses sprang up everywhere with accommodations to suit the
needs of purses of all lengths. Finally, large and costly hotels were
built for the prosperous and fashionable who began to find rare
enjoyment in the beautiful Ozark country while they drank their hot
water and took their invigorating baths. Hot Springs became a national
resort.

It will be seen that, in its way, Hot Springs has reflected the social
development of the country. It has passed through the various stages
that marked the national growth in taste and morals. During the period
when gambling was a national vice it was noted for its high play, and
then gamblers of all social grades looked forward to their season in the
South. During the period of national dissipation, when polite
drunkenness was a badge of class and New Year's day an orgy, it became
the periodic resort of inebriates, just as later, with the elevation of
the national moral sense, it became instead the most conservative of
resorts, the periodic refuge of thousands of work-worn business and
professional men seeking the astonishing recuperative power of its
water.

True again to the spirit of the times, Hot Springs reflects to the full
the spirit of to-day. It is a Southern mountain resort of quiet charm
and wonderful natural beauty set on the edge of a broad region of hills,
ravines, and sweet-smelling pines, a paradise for the walker, the hiker,
and the horseback rider. Down on the street a long row of handsome
modern bath-houses, equipped with all the scientific luxuries, and more
besides, of the most elaborate European spa, concentrates the business
of bath and cure. Back of this rise directly the beautiful Ozark hills.
One may have exactly what he wishes at Hot Springs. He may live with the
sick if that is his bent, or he may spend weeks of rich enjoyment of the
South in holiday mood, and have his baths besides, without a suggestion
of the sanitarium or even of the spa.

Meantime the mystery of the water's potency seems to have been solved.
It is not chemical in solution which clears the system of its ills and
restores the jaded tissues to buoyancy, but the newly discovered
principle of radioactivity. Somewhere deep in Nature's laboratory these
waters become charged with an uplifting power which is imparted t