of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty
days of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why
people should go to Saratoga, except to see people. True, as a general
thing, they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are
summering. But if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in
the country during the nine months of our Northern winter, he may have
a mighty hunger and thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces
and hear human voices; but even then Saratoga is not the place to go
to, on account of this very artificialness. By artificial I do not
mean deceitful. I saw nobody but nice people there, smooth, kind, and
polite. By artificial I mean wrought up. You don't get at the heart
of things. Artificialness spreads and spans all with a crystal
barrier,--invisible, but palpable. Nothing was left to grow and go at
its own sweet will. The very springs were paved and pavilioned. For
green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of brooks, which
one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a
pleasure-ground, graded and grassed and pathed like a cemetery, wherein
nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume. Everything took
pattern and was elaborate. Nothing was left to the imagination, the
taste, the curiosity. A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and
blinded you, and threatened profanity. Now profanity is wicked and
vulgar; but if you listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that
you will not hear them whispering, under, "Thunder!"

For the restorative qualities of Saratoga I have nothing to say. I was
well when I went there; nor did my experience ever furnish me with any
disease that I should consider worse than an intermittent attack of her
spring waters. But whatever it may do for the body, I do not believe
it is for the soul. I do not believe that such places, such scenes,
such a fashion of life ever nourishes a vigorous womanhood or manhood.
Taken homeopathically, it may be harmless; but become a habit, a
necessity, it must vitiate, enervate, destroy. Men can stand it, for
the sea-breezes and the mountain-breezes may have full sweep through
their life; but women cannot, for they just go home and live air-tight.

If the railroad-men at Saratoga tell you that you can go straight from
there to the foot of Lake George, don't you believe a word of it.
Perhaps you can, and perhaps you cannot; but you are not any