tire of dropping into the
reposeful reception-room, where he never by any chance met anybody,
and sitting with the melodeon and big Bible Society edition of the
Scriptures, and a chance copy of the Christian at Play. These amusements
were varied by sympathetic listening to the complaints of the proprietor
about the vandalism of visitors who wrote with diamonds on the
window-panes, so that the glass had to be renewed, or scratched their
names on the pillars of the piazza, so that the whole front had to be
repainted, or broke off the azalea blossoms, or in other ways desecrated
the premises. In order to fit himself for a sojourn here, Mr. King tried
to commit to memory a placard that was neatly framed and hung on the
veranda, wherein it was stated that the owner cheerfully submits to all
necessary use of the premises, "but will not permit any unnecessary use,
or the exercise of a depraved taste or vandalism." There were not as yet
many guests, and those who were there seemed to have conned this placard
to their improvement, for there was not much exercise of any sort of
taste. Of course there were two or three brides, and there was the
inevitable English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter
ram-roddy and uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in
response to a gentleman who was giving her information about travel,
constantly ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, yas; ow, ow, ow, really!"

And there was the young bride from Kankazoo, who frightened Mr. King
back into his chamber one morning when he opened his door and beheld the
vision of a woman going towards the breakfast-room in what he took to be
a robe de nuit, but which turned out to be one of the "Mother-Hubbards"
which have had a certain celebrity as street dresses in some parts of
the West. But these gayeties palled after a time, and one afternoon
our travelers, with their vandalism all subdued, walked a mile over the
rocks to the Kaaterskill House, and took up their abode there to watch
the opening of the season. Naturally they expected some difficulty in
transferring their two trunks round by the road, where there had been
nothing but a wilderness forty years ago; but their change of base was
facilitated by the obliging hotelkeeper in the most friendly manner, and
when he insisted on charging only four dollars for moving the trunks,
the two friends said that, considering the wear and tear of the mountain
involved, they did not see how he co