{0047}
Mr. King remarked upon this dumb-show to a gentleman in a blue coat and white vest and gray hat, leaning against a column near him. The gentleman made no response. It was most singular. Mr. King stepped back to be out of the way of some children racing down the piazza, and, half stumbling, sat down in the lap of a dowager—no, not quite; the chair was empty, and he sat down in the fresh varnish, to which his clothes stuck fast. Was this a delusion? No. The tables were filled in the dining-room, the waiters were scurrying about, there were ladies on the balconies looking dreamily down upon the animated scene below; all the movements of gayety and hilarity in the height of a season. Mr. King approached a group who were standing waiting for a carriage, but they did not see him, and did not respond to his trumped-up question about the next train. Were these, then, shadows, or was he a spirit himself? Were these empty omnibuses and carriages that discharged ghostly passengers? And all this promenading and flirting and languishing and love-making, would it come to nothing-nothing more than usual? There was a charm about it all—the movement, the color, the gray sand, and the rosy blush on the sea—a lovely place, an enchanted place. Were these throngs the guests that were to come, or those that had been herein other seasons? Why could not the former “materialize” as well as the latter? Is it not as easy to make nothing out of what never yet existed as out of what has ceased to exist? The landlord, by faith, sees all this array which is prefigured so strangely to Mr. King; and his comely young wife sees it and is ready for it; and the fat son at the supper table—a living example of the good eating to be had here—is serene, and has the air of being polite and knowing to a houseful. This scrap of a child, with the aplomb of a man of fifty, wise beyond his fatness, imparts information to the travelers about the wine, speaks to the waiter with quiet authority, and makes these mature men feel like boys before the gravity of our perfect flower of American youth who has known no childhood. This boy at least is no phantom; the landlord is real, and the waiters, and the food they bring.
“I suppose,” said Mr. King to his friend, “that we are opening the season. Did you see anything outdoors?”
“Yes; a horseshoe-crab about a mile below here on the smooth sand, with a long dotted trail behind him, a couple of girls in a pony-cart who nearly drove over me, and a tall young lady with a red parasol, accompanied by a big black-and-white dog, walking rapidly, close to the edge of the sea, towards the sunset. It's just lovely, the silvery sweep of coast in this light.”
“It seems a refined sort of place in its outlines, and quietly respectable. They tell me here that they don't want the excursion crowds that overrun Atlantic City, but an Atlantic City man, whom I met at the pier, said that Cape May used to be the boss, but that Atlantic City had got the bulge on it now—had thousands to the hundreds here. To get the bulge seems a desirable thing in America, and I think we'd better see what a place is like that is popular, whether fashion recognizes it or not.”
The place lost nothing in the morning light, and it was a sparkling morning with a fresh breeze. Nature, with its love of simple, sweeping lines, and its feeling for atmospheric effect, has done everything for the place, and bad taste has not quite spoiled it. There is a sloping, shallow beach, very broad, of fine, hard sand, excellent for driving or for walking, extending unbroken three miles down to Cape May Point, which has hotels and cottages of its own, and lifesaving and signal stations. Off to the west from this point is the long sand line to Cape Henlopen, fourteen miles away, and the Delaware shore. At Cape May Point there is a little village of painted wood houses, mostly cottages to let, and a permanent population of a few hundred inhabitants. From the pier one sees a mile and a half of hotels and cottages, fronting south, all flaming, tasteless, carpenter's architecture, gay with paint. The sea expanse is magnificent, and the sweep of beach is fortunately unencumbered, and vulgarized by no bath-houses or show-shanties. The bath-houses are in front of the hotels and in their enclosures; then come the broad drive, and the sand beach, and the sea. The line is broken below by the lighthouse and a point of land, whereon stands the elephant. This elephant is not indigenous, and he stands alone in the sand, a wooden sham without an explanation. Why the hotel-keeper's mind along the coast regards this grotesque structure as a summer attraction it is difficult to see. But when one resort had him, he became a necessity everywhere. The travelers walked down to this monster, climbed the stairs in one of his legs, explored the rooms, looked out from the saddle, and pondered on the problem. This beast was unfinished within and unpainted without, and already falling into decay. An elephant on the desert, fronting the Atlantic Ocean, had, after all, a picturesque aspect, and all the more so because he was a deserted ruin.
The elephant was, however, no emptier than the cottages about which our friends strolled. But the cottages were all ready, the rows of new chairs stood on the fresh piazzas, the windows were invitingly open, the pathetic little patches of flowers in front tried hard to look festive in the dry sands, and the stout landladies in their rocking-chairs calmly knitted and endeavored to appear as if they expected nobody, but had almost a houseful.
Yes, the place was undeniably attractive. The sea had the blue of Nice; why must we always go to the Mediterranean for an aqua marina, for poetic lines, for delicate shades? What charming gradations had this picture-gray sand, blue waves, a line of white sails against the pale blue sky! By the pier railing is a bevy of little girls grouped about an ancient colored man, the very ideal old Uncle Ned, in ragged, baggy, and disreputable clothes, lazy good-nature oozing out of every pore of him, kneeling by a telescope pointed to a bunch of white sails on the horizon; a dainty little maiden, in a stiff white skirt and golden hair, leans against him and tiptoes up to the object-glass, shutting first one eye and then the other, and making nothing out of it all. “Why, ov co'se you can't see nuffln, honey,” said Uncle Ned, taking a peep, “wid the 'scope p'inted up in the sky.”
{0053}
In order to pass from Cape May to Atlantic City one takes a long circuit by rail through the Jersey sands. Jersey is a very prolific State, but the railway traveler by this route is excellently prepared for Atlantic City, for he sees little but sand, stunted pines, scrub oaks, small frame houses, sometimes trying to hide in the clumps of scrub oaks, and the villages are just collections of the same small frame houses hopelessly decorated with scroll-work and obtrusively painted, standing in lines on sandy streets, adorned with lean shade-trees. The handsome Jersey people were not traveling that day—the two friends had a theory about the relation of a sandy soil to female beauty—and when the artist got out his pencil to catch the types of the country, he was well rewarded. There were the fat old women in holiday market costumes, strong-featured, positive, who shook their heads at each other and nodded violently and incessantly, and all talked at once; the old men in rusty suits, thin, with a deprecatory manner, as if they had heard that clatter for fifty years, and perky, sharp-faced girls in vegetable hats, all long-nosed and thin-lipped. And though the day was cool, mosquitoes had the bad taste to invade the train. At the junction, a small collection of wooden shanties, where the travelers waited an hour, they heard much of the glories of Atlantic City from the postmistress, who was waiting for an excursion some time to go there (the passion for excursions seems to be a growing one), and they made the acquaintance of a cow tied in the room next the ticket-office, probably also waiting for a passage to the city by the sea.
{0055}
And a city it is. If many houses, endless avenues, sand, paint, make a city, the artist confessed that this was one. Everything is on a large scale. It covers a large territory, the streets run at right angles, the avenues to the ocean take the names of the states. If the town had been made to order and sawed out by one man, it could not be more beautifully regular and more satisfactorily monotonous. There is nothing about it to give the most commonplace mind in the world a throb of disturbance. The hotels, the cheap shops, the cottages, are all of wood, and, with three or four exceptions in the thousands, they are all practically alike, all ornamented with scroll-work, as if cut out by the jig-saw, all vividly painted, all appealing to a primitive taste just awakening to the appreciation of the gaudy chromo and the illuminated and consoling household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues of flimsy carpentry-work, in the way of cheap-John shops, tin-type booths, peep-shows, go-rounds, shooting-galleries, pop-beer and cigar shops, restaurants, barber shops, photograph galleries, summer theatres. Sometimes the plank walk runs for a mile or two, on its piles, between rows of these shops and booths, and again it drops off down by the waves. Here and there is a gayly-painted wooden canopy by the shore, with chairs where idlers can sit and watch the frolicking in the water, or a space railed off, where the select of the hotels lie or lounge in the sand under red umbrellas. The calculating mind wonders how many million feet of lumber there are in this unpicturesque barricade, and what gigantic forests have fallen to make this timber front to the sea. But there is one thing man cannot do. He has made this show to suit himself, he has pushed out several iron piers into the sea, and erected, of course, a skating rink on the end of one of them. But the sea itself, untamed, restless, shining, dancing, raging, rolls in from the southward, tossing the white sails on its vast expanse, green, blue, leaden, white-capped, many-colored, never two minutes the same, sounding with its eternal voice I knew not what rebuke to man.
When Mr. King wrote his and his friend's name in the book at the Mansion House, he had the curiosity to turn over the leaves, and it was not with much surprise that he read there the names of A. J. Benson, wife, and daughter, Cyrusville, Ohio.
“Oh, I see!” said the artist; “you came down here to see Mr. Benson!”
That gentleman was presently discovered tilted back in a chair on the piazza, gazing vacantly into the vacant street with that air of endurance that fathers of families put on at such resorts. But he brightened up when Mr. King made himself known.
“I'm right glad to see you, sir. And my wife and daughter will be. I was saying to my wife yesterday that I couldn't stand this sort of thing much longer.”
“You don't find it lively?”
“Well, the livelier it is the less I shall like it, I reckon. The town is well enough. It's one of the smartest places on the coast. I should like to have owned the ground and sold out and retired. This sand is all gold. They say they sell the lots by the bushel and count every sand. You can see what it is, boards and paint and sand. Fine houses, too; miles of them.”
“And what do you do?”
“Oh, they say there's plenty to do. You can ride around in the sand; you can wade in it if you want to, and go down to the beach and walk up and down the plank walk—walk up and down—walk up and down. They like it. You can't bathe yet without getting pneumonia. They have gone there now. Irene goes because she says she can't stand the gayety of the parlor.”
From the parlor came the sound of music. A young girl who had the air of not being afraid of a public parlor was drumming out waltzes on the piano, more for the entertainment of herself than of the half-dozen ladies who yawned over their worsted-work. As she brought her piece to an end with a bang, a pretty, sentimental miss with a novel in her hand, who may not have seen Mr. King looking in at the door, ran over to the player and gave her a hug. “That's beautiful! that's perfectly lovely, Mamie!”—“This,” said the player, taking up another sheet, “has not been played much in New York.” Probably not, in that style, thought Mr. King, as the girl clattered through it.
{0059}
There was no lack of people on the promenade, tramping the boards, or hanging about the booths where the carpenters and painters were at work, and the shop men and women were unpacking the corals and the sea-shells, and the cheap jewelry, and the Swiss wood-carving, the toys, the tinsel brooches, and agate ornaments, and arranging the soda fountains, and putting up the shelves for the permanent pie. The sort of preparation going on indicated the kind of crowd expected. If everything had a cheap and vulgar look, our wandering critics remembered that it is never fair to look behind the scenes of a show, and that things would wear a braver appearance by and by. And if the women on the promenade were homely and ill-dressed, even the bonnes in unpicturesque costumes, and all the men were slouchy and stolid, how could any one tell what an effect of gayety and enjoyment there might be when there were thousands of such people, and the sea was full of bathers, and the flags were flying, and the bands were tooting, and all the theatres were opened, and acrobats and spangled women and painted red-men offered those attractions which, like government, are for the good of the greatest number? What will you have? Shall vulgarity be left just vulgar, and have no apotheosis and glorification? This is very fine of its kind, and a resort for the million. The million come here to enjoy themselves. Would you have an art-gallery here, and high-priced New York and Paris shops lining the way?
“Look at the town,” exclaimed the artist, “and see what money can do, and satisfy the average taste without the least aid from art. It's just wonderful. I've tramped round the place, and, taking out a cottage or two, there isn't a picturesque or pleasing view anywhere. I tell you people know what they want, and enjoy it when they get it.”
“You needn't get excited about it,” said Mr. King. “Nobody said it wasn't commonplace, and glaringly vulgar if you like, and if you like to consider it representative of a certain stage in national culture, I hope it is not necessary to remind you that the United States can beat any other people in any direction they choose to expand themselves. You'll own it when you've seen watering-places enough.”
After this defense of the place, Mr. King owned it might be difficult for Mr. Forbes to find anything picturesque to sketch. What figures, to be sure! As if people were obliged to be shapely or picturesque for the sake of a wandering artist! “I could do a tree,” growled Mr. Forbes, “or a pile of boards; but these shanties!”
When they were well away from the booths and bath-houses, Mr. King saw in the distance two ladies. There was no mistaking one of them—the easy carriage, the grace of movement. No such figure had been afield all day. The artist was quick to see that. Presently they came up with them, and found them seated on a bench, looking off upon Brigantine Island, a low sand dune with some houses and a few trees against the sky, the most pleasing object in view.
Mrs. Benson did not conceal the pleasure she felt in seeing Mr. King again, and was delighted to know his friend; and, to say the truth, Miss Irene gave him a very cordial greeting.
“I'm 'most tired to death,” said Mrs. Benson, when they were all seated. “But this air does me good. Don't you like Atlantic City?”
“I like it better than I did at first.” If the remark was intended for Irene, she paid no attention to it, being absorbed in explaining to Mr. Forbes why she preferred the deserted end of the promenade.
“It's a place that grows on you. I guess it's grown the wrong way on Irene and father; but I like the air—after the South. They say we ought to see it in August, when all Philadelphia is here.”
“I should think it might be very lively.”
“Yes; but the promiscuous bathing. I don't think I should like that. We are not brought up to that sort of thing in Ohio.”
“No? Ohio is more like France, I suppose?”
“Like France!” exclaimed the old lady, looking at him in amazement—“like France! Why, France is the wickedest place in the world.”
“No doubt it is, Mrs. Benson. But at the sea resorts the sexes bathe separately.”
“Well, now! I suppose they have to there.”
“Yes; the older nations grow, the more self-conscious they become.”
“I don't believe, for all you say, Mr. King, the French have any more conscience than we have.”
“Nor do I, Mrs. Benson. I was only trying to say that they pay more attention to appearances.”
“Well, I was brought up to think it's one thing to appear, and another thing to be,” said Mrs. Benson, as dismissing the subject. “So your friend's an artist? Does he paint? Does he take portraits? There was an artist at Cyrusville last winter who painted portraits, but Irene wouldn't let him do hers. I'm glad we've met Mr. Forbes. I've always wanted to have—”
“Oh, mother,” exclaimed Irene, who always appeared to keep one ear for her mother's conversation, “I was just saying to Mr. Forbes that he ought to see the art exhibitions down at the other end of the promenade, and the pictures of the people who come here in August. Are you rested?”
The party moved along, and Mr. King, by a movement that seemed to him more natural than it did to Mr. Forbes, walked with Irene, and the two fell to talking about the last spring's trip in the South.
“Yes, we enjoyed the exhibition, but I am not sure but I should have enjoyed New Orleans more without the exhibition. That took so much time. There is nothing so wearisome as an exhibition. But New Orleans was charming. I don't know why, for it's the flattest, dirtiest, dampest city in the world; but it is charming. Perhaps it's the people, or the Frenchiness of it, or the tumble-down, picturesque old creole quarter, or the roses; I didn't suppose there were in the world so many roses; the town was just wreathed and smothered with them. And you did not see it?”
“No; I have been to exhibitions, and I thought I should prefer to take New Orleans by itself some other time. You found the people hospitable?”
“Well, they were not simply hospitable; they were that, to be sure, for father had letters to some of the leading men; but it was the general air of friendliness and good-nature everywhere, of agreeableness—it went along with the roses and the easy-going life. You didn't feel all the time on a strain. I don't suppose they are any better than our people, and I've no doubt I should miss a good deal there after a while—a certain tonic and purpose in life. But, do you know, it is pleasant sometimes to be with people who haven't so many corners as our people have. But you went south from Fortress Monroe?”
“Yes; I went to Florida.”
“Oh, that must be a delightful country!”
“Yes, it's a very delightful land, or will be when it is finished. It needs advertising now. It needs somebody to call attention to it. The modest Northerners who have got hold of it, and staked it all out into city lots, seem to want to keep it all to themselves.”
“How do you mean 'finished'?”
“Why, the State is big enough, and a considerable portion of it has a good foundation. What it wants is building up. There's plenty of water and sand, and palmetto roots and palmetto trees, and swamps, and a perfectly wonderful vegetation of vines and plants and flowers. What it needs is land—at least what the Yankees call land. But it is coming on. A good deal of the State below Jacksonville is already ten to fifteen feet above the ocean.”
“But it's such a place for invalids!”
“Yes, it is a place for invalids. There are two kinds of people there—invalids and speculators. Thousands of people in the bleak North, and especially in the Northwest, cannot live in the winter anywhere else than in Florida. It's a great blessing to this country to have such a sanitarium. As I said, all it needs is building up, and then it wouldn't be so monotonous and malarious.”
“But I had such a different idea of it!”
“Well, your idea is probably right. You cannot do justice to a place by describing it literally. Most people are fascinated by Florida: the fact is that anything is preferable to our Northern climate from February to May.”
“And you didn't buy an orange plantation, or a town?”
“No; I was discouraged. Almost any one can have a town who will take a boat and go off somewhere with a surveyor, and make a map.”
The truth is—the present writer had it from Major Blifill, who runs a little steamboat upon one of the inland creeks where the alligator is still numerous enough to be an entertainment—that Mr. King was no doubt malarious himself when he sailed over Florida. Blifill says he offended a whole boatfull one day when they were sailing up the St. John's. Probably he was tired of water, and swamp and water, and scraggy trees and water. The captain was on the bow, expatiating to a crowd of listeners on the fertility of the soil and the salubrity of the climate. He had himself bought a piece of ground away up there somewhere for two hundred dollars, cleared it up, and put in orange-trees, and thousands wouldn't buy it now. And Mr. King, who listened attentively, finally joined in with the questioners, and said, “Captain, what is the average price of land down in this part of Florida by the—gallon?”
They had come down to the booths, and Mrs. Benson was showing the artist the shells, piles of conchs, and other outlandish sea-fabrications in which it is said the roar of the ocean can be heard when they are hundreds of miles away from the sea. It was a pretty thought, Mr. Forbes said, and he admired the open shells that were painted on the inside—painted in bright blues and greens, with dabs of white sails and a lighthouse, or a boat with a bare-armed, resolute young woman in it, sending her bark spinning over waves mountain-high.
“Yes,” said the artist, “what cheerfulness those works of art will give to the little parlors up in the country, when they are set up with other shells on the what-not in the corner! These shells always used to remind me of missionaries and the cause of the heathen; but when I see them now I shall think of Atlantic City.”
“But the representative things here,” interrupted Irene, “are the photographs, the tintypes. To see them is just as good as staying here to see the people when they come.”
“Yes,” responded Mr. King, “I think art cannot go much further in this direction.”
If there were not miles of these show-cases of tintypes, there were at least acres of them. Occasionally an instantaneous photograph gave a lively picture of the beach, when the water was full of bathers-men, women, children, in the most extraordinary costumes for revealing or deforming the human figure—all tossing about in the surf. But most of the pictures were taken on dry land, of single persons, couples, and groups in their bathing suits. Perhaps such an extraordinary collection of humanity cannot be seen elsewhere in the world, such a uniformity of one depressing type reduced to its last analysis by the sea-toilet. Sometimes it was a young man and a maiden, handed down to posterity in dresses that would have caused their arrest in the street, sentimentally reclining on a canvas rock. Again it was a maiden with flowing hair, raised hands clasped, eyes upturned, on top of a crag, at the base of which the waves were breaking in foam. Or it was the same stalwart maiden, or another as good, in a boat which stood on end, pulling through the surf with one oar, and dragging a drowning man (in a bathing suit also) into the boat with her free hand. The legend was, “Saved.” There never was such heroism exhibited by young women before, with such raiment, as was shown in these rare works of art.
As they walked back to the hotel through a sandy avenue lined with jig-saw architecture, Miss Benson pointed out to them some things that she said had touched her a good deal. In the patches of sand before each house there was generally an oblong little mound set about with a rim of stones, or, when something more artistic could be afforded, with shells. On each of these little graves was a flower, a sickly geranium, or a humble marigold, or some other floral token of affection.
Mr. Forbes said he never was at a watering-place before where they buried the summer boarders in the front yard. Mrs. Benson didn't like joking on such subjects, and Mr. King turned the direction of the conversation by remarking that these seeming trifles were really of much account in these days, and he took from his pocket a copy of the city newspaper, 'The Summer Sea-Song,' and read some of the leading items: “S., our eye is on you.” “The Slopers have come to their cottage on Q Street, and come to stay.” “Mr. E. P. Borum has painted his front steps.” “Mr. Diffendorfer's marigold is on the blow.” And so on, and so on. This was probably the marigold mentioned that they were looking at.
The most vivid impression, however, made upon the visitor in this walk was that of paint. It seemed unreal that there could be so much paint in the world and so many swearing colors. But it ceased to be a dream, and they were taken back into the hard, practical world, when, as they turned the corner, Irene pointed out her favorite sign:
Silas Lapham, mineral paint.Branch Office.
The artist said, a couple of days after this morning, that he had enough of it. “Of course,” he added, “it is a great pleasure to me to sit and talk with Mrs. Benson, while you and that pretty girl walk up and down the piazza all the evening; but I'm easily satisfied, and two evenings did for me.”
So that, much as Mr. King was charmed with Atlantic City, and much as he regretted not awaiting the arrival of the originals of the tintypes, he gave in to the restlessness of the artist for other scenes; but not before he had impressed Mrs. Benson with a notion of the delights of Newport in July.
{9068}
The view of the Catskills from a certain hospitable mansion on the east side of the Hudson is better than any mew from those delectable hills. The artist said so one morning late in June, and Mr. King agreed with him, as a matter of fact, but would have no philosophizing about it, as that anticipation is always better than realization; and when Mr. Forbes went on to say that climbing a mountain was a good deal like marriage—the world was likely to look a little flat once that cerulean height was attained—Mr. King only remarked that that was a low view to take of the subject, but he would confess that it was unreasonable to expect that any rational object could fulfill, or even approach, the promise held out by such an exquisite prospect as that before them.
The friends were standing where the Catskill hills lay before them in echelon towards the river, the ridges lapping over each other and receding in the distance, a gradation of lines most artistically drawn, still further refined by shades of violet, which always have the effect upon the contemplative mind of either religious exaltation or the kindling of a sentiment which is in the young akin to the emotion of love. While the artist was making some memoranda of these outlines, and Mr. King was drawing I know not what auguries of hope from these purple heights, a young lady seated upon a rock near by—a young lady just stepping over the border-line of womanhood—had her eyes also fixed upon those dreamy distances, with that look we all know so well, betraying that shy expectancy of life which is unconfessed, that tendency to maidenly reverie which it were cruel to interpret literally. At the moment she is more interesting than the Catskills—the brown hair, the large eyes unconscious of anything but the most natural emotion, the shapely waist just beginning to respond to the call of the future—it is a pity that we shall never see her again, and that she has nothing whatever to do with our journey. She also will have her romance; fate will meet her in the way some day, and set her pure heart wildly beating, and she will know what those purple distances mean. Happiness, tragedy, anguish—who can tell what is in store for her? I cannot but feel profound sadness at meeting her in this casual way and never seeing her again. Who says that the world is not full of romance and pathos and regret as we go our daily way in it? You meet her at a railway station; there is the flutter of a veil, the gleam of a scarlet bird, the lifting of a pair of eyes—she is gone; she is entering a drawing-room, and stops a moment and turns away; she is looking from a window as you pass—it is only a glance out of eternity; she stands for a second upon a rock looking seaward; she passes you at the church door—is that all? It is discovered that instantaneous photographs can be taken. They are taken all the time; some of them are never developed, but I suppose these impressions are all there on the sensitive plate, and that the plate is permanently affected by the impressions. The pity of it is that the world is so full of these undeveloped knowledges of people worth knowing and friendships worth making.
The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods. The ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was only relieved by the society of the passengers. There were two bright little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big, good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by his rude and dominating behavior. The boy was a product which it is the despair of all Europe to produce, and our travelers had great delight in him as an epitome of American “smartness.” He led all the conversation, had confident opinions about everything, easily put down his deferential papa, and pleased the other passengers by his self-sufficient, know-it-all air. To a boy who had traveled in California and seen the Alps it was not to be expected that this humble mountain could afford much entertainment, and he did not attempt to conceal his contempt for it. When the stage reached the Rip Van Winkle House, half-way, the shy schoolgirls were for indulging a little sentiment over the old legend, but the boy, who concealed his ignorance of the Irving romance until his cousins had prattled the outlines of it, was not to be taken in by any such chaff, and though he was a little staggered by Rip's own cottage, and by the sight of the cave above it which is labeled as the very spot where the vagabond took his long nap, he attempted to bully the attendant and drink-mixer in the hut, and openly flaunted his incredulity until the bar-tender showed him a long bunch of Rip's hair, which hung like a scalp on a nail, and the rusty barrel and stock of the musket. The cabin is, indeed, full of old guns, pistols, locks of hair, buttons, cartridge-boxes, bullets, knives, and other undoubted relics of Rip and the Revolution. This cabin, with its facilities for slaking thirst on a hot day, which Rip would have appreciated, over a hundred years old according to information to be obtained on the spot, is really of unknown antiquity, the old boards and timber of which it is constructed having been brought down from the Mountain House some forty years ago.
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The old Mountain House, standing upon its ledge of rock, from which one looks down upon a map of a considerable portion of New York and New England, with the lake in the rear, and heights on each side that offer charming walks to those who have in contemplation views of nature or of matrimony, has somewhat lost its importance since the vast Catskill region has come to the knowledge of the world. A generation ago it was the centre of attraction, and it was understood that going to the Catskills was going there. Generations of searchers after immortality have chiseled their names in the rock platform, and one who sits there now falls to musing on the vanity of human nature and the transitoriness of fashion. Now New York has found that it has very convenient to it a great mountain pleasure-ground; railways and excellent roads have pierced it, the varied beauties of rocks, ravines, and charming retreats are revealed, excellent hotels capable of entertaining a thousand guests are planted on heights and slopes commanding mountain as well as lowland prospects, great and small boarding-houses cluster in the high valleys and on the hillsides, and cottages more thickly every year dot the wild region. Year by year these accommodations will increase, new roads around the gorges will open more enchanting views, and it is not improbable that the species of American known as the “summer boarder” will have his highest development and apotheosis in these mountains.
Nevertheless Mr. King was not uninterested in renewing his memories of the old house. He could recall without difficulty, and also without emotion now, a scene on this upper veranda and a moonlight night long ago, and he had no doubt he could find her name carved on a beech-tree in the wood near by; but it was useless to look for it, for her name had been changed. The place was, indeed, full of memories, but all chastened and subdued by the indoor atmosphere, which impressed him as that of a faded Sunday. He was very careful not to disturb the decorum by any frivolity of demeanor, and he cautioned the artist on this point; but Mr. Forbes declared that the dining-room fare kept his spirits at a proper level. There was an old-time satisfaction in wandering into the parlor, and resting on the haircloth sofa, and looking at the hair-cloth chairs, and pensively imagining a meeting there, with songs out of the Moody and Sankey book; and he did not 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!”
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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 could afford to do it for such a sum, and they went away, as they said, well pleased.
It happened to be at the Kaaterskill House—it might have been at the Grand, or the Overlook—that the young gentlemen in search of information saw the Catskill season get under way. The phase of American life is much the same at all these great caravansaries. It seems to the writer, who has the greatest admiration for the military genius that can feed and fight an army in the field, that not enough account is made of the greater genius that can organize and carry on a great American hotel, with a thousand or fifteen hundred guests, in a short, sharp, and decisive campaign of two months, at the end of which the substantial fruits of victory are in the hands of the landlord, and the guests are allowed to depart with only their personal baggage and side-arms, but so well pleased that they are inclined to renew the contest next year. This is a triumph of mind over mind. It is not merely the organization and the management of the army under the immediate command of the landlord, the accumulation and distribution of supplies upon this mountain-top, in the uncertainty whether the garrison on a given day will be one hundred or one thousand, not merely the lodging, rationing and amusing of this shifting host, but the satisfying of as many whims and prejudices as there are people who leave home on purpose to grumble and enjoy themselves in the exercise of a criticism they dare not indulge in their own houses. Our friends had an opportunity of seeing the machinery set in motion in one of these great establishments. Here was a vast balloon structure, founded on a rock, but built in the air, and anchored with cables, with towers and a high pillared veranda, capable, with its annex, of lodging fifteen hundred people. The army of waiters and chamber-maids, of bellboys, and scullions and porters and laundry-folk, was arriving; the stalwart scrubbers were at work, the store-rooms were filled, the big kitchen shone with its burnished coppers, and an array of white-capped and aproned cooks stood in line under their chef; the telegraph operator was waiting at her desk, the drug clerk was arranging his bottles, the newspaper stand was furnished, the post-office was open for letters. It needed but the arrival of a guest to set the machinery in motion. And as soon as the guest came the band would be there to launch him into the maddening gayety of the season. It would welcome his arrival in triumphant strains; it would pursue him at dinner, and drown his conversation; it will fill his siesta with martial dreams, and it would seize his legs in the evening, and entreat him to caper in the parlor. Everything was ready. And this was what happened. It was the evening of the opening day. The train wagons might be expected any moment. The electric lights were blazing. All the clerks stood expectant, the porters were by the door, the trim, uniformed bell-boys were all in waiting line, the register clerk stood fingering the leaves of the register with a gracious air. A noise is heard outside, the big door opens, there is a rush forward, and four people flock in a man in a linen duster, a stout woman, a lad of ten, a smartly dressed young lady, and a dog. Movement, welcome, ringing of bells, tramping of feet—the whole machinery has started. It was adjusted to crack an egg-shell or smash an iron-bound trunk. The few drops presaged a shower. The next day there were a hundred on the register; the day after, two hundred; and the day following, an excursion.
With increasing arrivals opportunity was offered for the study of character. Away from his occupation, away from the cares of the household and the demands of society, what is the self-sustaining capacity of the ordinary American man or woman? It was interesting to note the enthusiasm of the first arrival, the delight in the view—Round Top, the deep gorges, the charming vista of the lowlands, a world and wilderness of beauty; the inspiration of the air, the alertness to explore in all directions, to see the lake, the falls, the mountain paths. But is a mountain sooner found out than a valley, or is there a want of internal resources, away from business, that the men presently become rather listless, take perfunctory walks for exercise, and are so eager for meal-time and mail-time? Why do they depend so much upon the newspapers, when they all despise the newspapers? Mr. King used to listen of an evening to the commonplace talk about the fire, all of which was a dilution of what they had just got out of the newspapers, but what a lively assent there was to a glib talker who wound up his remarks with a denunciation of the newspapers! The man was no doubt quite right, but did he reflect on the public loss of his valuable conversation the next night if his newspaper should chance to fail? And the women, after their first feeling of relief, did they fall presently into petty gossip, complaints about the table, criticisms of each other's dress, small discontents with nearly everything? Not all of them.
An excursion is always resented by the regular occupants of a summer resort, who look down upon the excursionists, while they condescend to be amused by them. It is perhaps only the common attitude of the wholesale to the retail dealer, although it is undeniable that a person seems temporarily to change his nature when he becomes part of an excursion; whether it is from the elation at the purchase of a day of gayety below the market price, or the escape from personal responsibility under a conductor, or the love of being conspicuous as a part of a sort of organization, the excursionist is not on his ordinary behavior.
An excursion numbering several hundreds, gathered along the river towns by the benevolent enterprise of railway officials, came up to the mountain one day. The officials seemed to have run a drag-net through factories, workshops, Sunday-schools, and churches, and scooped in the weary workers at homes and in shops unaccustomed to a holiday. Our friends formed a part of a group on the hotel piazza who watched the straggling arrival of this band of pleasure. For by this time our two friends had found a circle of acquaintances, with the facility of watering-place life, which in its way represented certain phases of American life as well as the excursion. A great many writers have sought to classify and label and put into a paragraph a description of the American girl. She is not to be disposed of by any such easy process. Undoubtedly she has some common marks of nationality that distinguish her from the English girl, but in variety she is practically infinite, and likely to assume almost any form, and the characteristics of a dozen nationalities. No one type represents her. What, indeed, would one say of this little group on the hotel piazza, making its comments upon the excursionists? Here is a young lady of, say, twenty-three years, inclining already to stoutness, domestic, placid, with matron written on every line of her unselfish face, capable of being, if necessity were, a notable housekeeper, learned in preserves and jellies and cordials, sure to have her closets in order, and a place for every remnant, piece of twine, and all odds and ends. Not a person to read Browning with, but to call on if one needed a nurse, or a good dinner, or a charitable deed. Beside her, in an invalid's chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken down into what is called nervous prostration. In striking contrast was Miss Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to what the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken school education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world. A handsome girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee, confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural and frank to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in fashionable life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to meet men in public life, in hotels, a very “jolly” companion, with a fund of good sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own affairs. Mr. King was at the moment conversing with still another young lady, who had more years than the last-named-short, compact figure, round girlish face, good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing, self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments, and seemed to have thought deeply on a large range of topics, but had a sort of downright practicality and cool independence, with all her femininity of bearing, that rather, puzzled her interlocutor. It occurred to Mr. King to guess that Miss Selina Morton might be from Boston, which she was not, but it was with a sort of shock of surprise that he learned later that this young girl, moving about in society in the innocent panoply of girlhood, was a young doctor, who had no doubt looked through and through him with her keen eyes, studied him in the light of heredity, constitutional tendencies, habits, and environment, as a possible patient. It almost made him ill to think of it. Here were types enough for one morning; but there was still another.