lite, flattering, with a venerable
head of gray wool, was the bartender, who mixed his juleps with a
flourish as if keeping time to music. "Haven't I waited on you befo',
sah? At Capon Springs? Sorry, sah, but tho't I knowed you when you come
in. Sorry, but glad to know you now, sah. If that julep don't suit you,
sah, throw it in my face."

A friendly, restful, family sort of place, with music, a little mild
dancing, mostly performed by children, in the pavilion, driving and
riding-in short, peace in the midst of noble scenery. No display of
fashion, the artist soon discovered, and he said he longed to give
the pretty girls some instruction in the art of dress. Forbes was a
missionary of "style." It hurt his sense of the fitness of things to see
women without it. He used to say that an ill-dressed woman would spoil
the finest landscape. For such a man, with an artistic feeling so
sensitive, the White Sulphur Springs is a natural goal. And he and his
friend hastened thither with as much speed as the Virginia railways,
whose time-tables are carefully adjusted to miss all connections,
permit.

"What do you think of a place," he wrote Miss Lamont--the girl read me
a portion of his lively letter that summer at Saratoga--"into which
you come by a belated train at half-past eleven at night, find friends
waiting up for you in evening costume, are taken to a champagne supper
at twelve, get to your quarters at one, and have your baggage delivered
to you at two o'clock in the morning?" The friends were lodged in
"Paradise Row"--a whimsical name given to one of the quarters assigned
to single gentlemen. Put into these single-room barracks, which were
neat but exceedingly primitive in their accommodations, by hilarious
negro attendants who appeared to regard life as one prolonged lark, and
who avowed that there was no time of day or night when a mint-julep
or any other necessary of life would not be forthcoming at a moment's
warning, the beginning of their sojourn at "The White" took on an air
of adventure, and the two strangers had the impression of having dropped
into a garrison somewhere on the frontier. But when King stepped out
upon the gallery, in the fresh summer morning, the scene that met his
eyes was one of such peaceful dignity, and so different from any in
his experience, that he was aware that he had come upon an original
development of watering-place life.

The White Sulphur has been for the better part of a century