ices of the Church,
retiring to the bridal chamber of the St. Nicholas! In the first place,
retiring to an hotel would appear to her a contradiction in terms; but
what would be her feelings when she found the walls of her apartment
furnished with fluted white silk and satin, and in the centre of the
room a matrimonial couch, hung with white silk curtains, and blazing
with a bright jet of gas from each bed-post! The doors of the
sleeping-rooms are often fitted with a very ingenious lock, having a
separate bolt and keyhole on each side, totally disconnected, and
consequently, as they can only be opened from the same side they are
fastened, no person, though possessed of a skeleton key, is able to
enter. The ominous warning, "Lock your door at night," which is usually
hung up, coupled with the promiscuous society frequently met in large
hotels, renders it most advisable to use every precaution.

Many hotels have a Bible in each bed-room, the gift of some religious
community in the city; those that I saw during my travels were most
frequently from the Presbyterians.

Having given you some details of an American first-class hotel in a
large city, you will perhaps be better able to realize the gigantic
nature of these establishments when I tell you that in some of them,
during the season, they consume, in one way and another, DAILY, from
fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds of meats, and from forty-five to
fifty pounds of tea, coffee, &c., and ice by the ton, and have a corps
of one hundred and fifty servants of all kinds. Washing is done in the
hotel with a rapidity little short of marvellous. You can get a shirt
well washed, and ready to put on, in nearly the same space of time as an
American usually passes under the barber's hands. The living at these
hotels is profuse to a degree, but, generally speaking, most
disagreeable: first, because the meal is devoured with a rapidity which
a pack of fox-hounds, after a week's fast, might in vain attempt to
rival; and, secondly, because it is impossible to serve up dinners for
hundreds without nine-tenths thereof being cold. The best of the large
hotels I dined at in New York, as regards _cuisine_, &c., was decidedly
the New York Hotel; but by far the most comfortable was the one I lived
in--Putnam's, Union-square--which was much smaller and quite new,
besides being removed from the racket of Broadway.

The increased intercourse with this country is evidently producing a
most