on much of
the furniture. The wood retains its natural colours, and there are no
carpets or paint. This charming little hotel is due to the taste or
whim of a New York electrical engineer (the inventor, I believe, of
the well-known "ticker"), who acts the landlord in such a way as to
make the sixty or seventy inmates feel like the guests of a private
host. The clerk is a medical student, the very bell-boy ("Eddy") a
candidate for Harvard, and both mix on equal terms with the genial
circle that collects round the bonfire lighted in front of the house
every summer's evening. As one lazily lay there, watching the wavering
play of the ruddy blaze on the dark-green pines, listening to the
educated chatter of the boy who cleaned the boots, realising that a
deer, a bear, or perchance even a catamount might possibly be lurking
in the dark woods around, and knowing that all the material comforts
of civilised life awaited one inside the house, one felt very keenly
the genuine Americanism of this Arcadia, and thought how hard it would
be to reproduce the effect even in the imagination of the European.

It was in this same Adirondack Wilderness that I stayed in the only
hotel that, so far as I know, caught on to the fact that I was a
"chiel amang them takin' notes" for a guidebook. With true American
enterprise I was informed, when I called for my bill, that that was
all right; and I still recall with amusement the incredulous and
obstinate resistance of the clerk to my insistence on paying my way. I
hope that the genial proprietors do not attribute the asterisk that I
gave the hotel to their well-meant efforts to give me _quid pro quo_,
but credit me with a totally unbiassed admiration for their good
management and comfortable quarters.

Mention has already been made (p. 30) of a hotel at a frequented
watering-place, at which the lowest purchasable quantity of sleep cost
one pound sterling. It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest
procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than
that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury
of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in
its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the
traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn
with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably
could not arise in any community that did not include a large class of
individuals with