t at
walking pace they conducted us to the hotel. And it was a hotel!!! Think
of one long, long board barn of two storeys high, not finished quite,
being built, with kind of little rabbit hole rooms off each side of a
long passage on both floors, in some the boards not meeting, so that you
can see into the next person's apartment, or into the open air as the
case may be, and in all, if a knot is out of the wood, a peep hole! The
flimsiest door not fitting, with the number of each room printed on a
bit of paper and fastened on with a tack; furniture consisting of a
rickety iron bed, a box that has been a packing case for a table,
another for a washstand, a rough single chair, sometimes a rocking
chair, and all crowned by a looking-glass that makes half your nose in
one part of your face, and one eye up in your forehead--too deliciously
comic. It was all very clean, except the bed clothes, but we won't speak
of them; their recollection shivers me.

Octavia and Tom had one room at the very end, and the rest of our
party had to scatter where we could, as numbers were taken, and it was
difficult to get even enough to go round. Mine was a very grand one,
because it had newspapers pasted on the boards partition, but it was
very deceptive, because one could not at once discern the knots and
cracks, and anyone might surprise one by poking a finger through in
unexpected places. Gaston had the next on my right, and Mercedes and
Columbia the one beyond him, and I did wonder, under the circumstances,
which of us he would peep at. I felt it would be me, because Mercedes
and Columbia being jeune filles, and he being a Frenchman, they would be
sacred. Nelson and the Senator together had a rather larger one on my
left, and that side my newspapers were torn, but I felt no apprehension.
The chivalry of American men is temptation proof.

Downstairs there was a bar and gambling saloon in one, with a sort of
hall place, a few feet square, but no dining room or any place for food.
It was merely a shelter from outside air. One had to trot along the
street to another shed called a restaurant, for meals.

How we laughed and the fun we had over it all! Nothing has delighted us
so much. Only Randolph Vinerhorn doesn't like it, but he is afraid to
say it before the Senator, though I heard him grumbling from across the
passage to Lola because he has not got his valet to shave him! Tom, of
course, is just as happy as we are. How I _love_ an adventu