verdressed women who glittered with diamonds and looked uncomfortable
in silks and velvets, and Broadway was gay with elegant equipages, but
nobody would go to Saratoga to study the fashions. Perhaps the most
impressive spectacle in this lowly world was the row of millionaires
sunning themselves every morning on the piazza of the States, solemn men
in black broadcloth and white hats, who said little, but looked rich;
visitors used to pass that way casually, and the townspeople regarded
them with a kind of awe, as if they were the king-pins of the whole
social fabric; but even these magnates were only pleasing incidents in
the kaleidoscopic show.

The first person King encountered on the piazza of the Grand Union was
not the one he most wished to see, although it could never be otherwise
than agreeable to meet his fair cousin, Mrs. Bartlett Glow. She was in
a fresh morning toilet, dainty, comme il faut, radiant, with that
unobtrusive manner of "society" which made the present surroundings,
appear a trifle vulgar to King, and to his self-disgust forced upon him
the image of Mrs. Benson.

"You here?" was his abrupt and involuntary exclamation.

"Yes--why not?" And then she added, as if from the Newport point of view
some explanation were necessary: "My husband thinks he must come here
for a week every year to take the waters; it's an old habit, and I find
it amusing for a few days. Of course there is nobody here. Will you take
me to the spring? Yes, Congress. I'm too old to change. If I believed
the pamphlets the proprietors write about each other's springs I should
never go to either of them."

Mrs. Bartlett Glow was not alone in saying that nobody was there. There
were scores of ladies at each hotel who said the same thing, and who
accounted for their own presence there in the way she did. And they
were not there at all in the same way they would be later at Lenox. Mrs.
Pendragon, of New Orleans, who was at the United States, would have said
the same thing, remembering the time when the Southern colony made a
very distinct impression upon the social life of the place; and the
Ashleys, who had put up at the Congress Hall in company with an
old friend, a returned foreign minister, who stuck to the old
traditions--even the Ashleys said they were only lookers-on at the
pageant.

Paying their entrance, and passing through the turnstile in the pretty
pavilion gate, they stood in the Congress Spring Park. The band was
pla