has held through the many years the highest rank, both from
intrinsic merit, and from an unfluctuating devotion of the fashionable
world, and has been aptly termed "The Queen of American Watering
Places."

The village of Saratoga, where dwells the benign goddess Hygeia, in
the midst of her far-famed waters of life and health, is pleasantly
situated within the heart of a broad stretch of varied table-land, in
the upper part and near the eastern boundary of New York.

The History

Of this fashionable resort embraces a century. The muse of history has
marked the spot with one of her red battleflags, and thus
distinguished her from the herd of new places whose mushroom growth is
like that of the gentility which they harbor.

[Illustration: ROUTES TO LAKE GEORGE.]

The first white visitor who is known to have drank from these "rivers
of Pactolus" is no less a distinguished person than Sir Wm. Johnson,
Bart., who was conducted hither, in 1767, by his Mohawk friends. At
that early day America could boast of little in the way of
aristocracy, and it was not till 1803 that the career of Saratoga, as
a fashionable watering place, was inaugurated. In this year, when the
village consisted of only three or four cabins, Gideon Putnam opened
the Union Hotel, and displayed his primitive sign of "Old Put and the
Wolf."

It was Putnam's ambition, when a boy even, to build him a great house,
and in his time the Union Hotel, then 70 feet long, seemed to him
doubtless comparatively as large as the present Grand Union seems to
us.

It is not necessary for us to follow Saratoga through its misfortunes
and its successes, its fires and its improvements, until it has
reached its present reputation and attractiveness.

Year after year the water wells up its sparkling currents; year after
year a little paint and plaster new-decks the great caravansaries;
year after year belles blush and sigh away the summer, or, linking
their destinies, rejoice or repine at leisure; and year after year,
for a short four months of sequence, the little town swarms and
rejoices with merry glee.

Routes to Saratoga.

During the visiting season trains from the metropolis reach the place
in five hours and thirty minutes--a distance of 186 miles. You can
leave the city at nine o'clock in the morning, and upon the
soft-cushioned seats, and amid the damask and velvet of Wagman's
magnificent drawing-room cars, enjoy a pleasurable journey up the
famo