Crieff, where the therapeutic appliances play but a
subdued obbligato to the daily round of amusements. The same spirit of
camaraderie generally rules at both; both have the same regular
meal-hours, at which almost as little drinking is seen at the one as
the other; both have their evening entertainments got up (_gotten_ up,
our American cousins say, with a delightfully old fashioned flavour)
by the enterprise of the most active guests. The hydropathists have to
go to bed a little sooner, and must walk to the neighbouring village
if they wish a bar-room; but on the whole their scheme of life is much
the same. Whether it is due to the American temperament or the
American weather, the palm for brightness, vivacity, variety, and
picturesqueness must be adjudged to the hotel. For those who are young
enough to "stand the racket," no form of social gaiety can he found
more amusing than a short sojourn at a popular summer hotel among the
mountains or by the sea, with its constant round of drives, rides,
tennis and golf matches, picnics, "germans," bathing, boating, and
loafing, all permeated by flirtation of the most audacious and
innocent description. The focus of the whole carnival is found in the
"piazza" or veranda, and no prettier sight in its way can be imagined
than the groups and rows of "rockers" and wicker chairs, each occupied
by a lithe young girl in a summer frock, or her athletic admirer in
his tennis flannels.

The enormous extent of the summer exodus to the mountains and the seas
in America is overwhelming; and a population of sixty-five millions
does not seem a bit too much to account for it. I used to think that
about all the Americans who could afford to travel came to Europe. But
the American tourists in Europe are, after all, but a drop in the
bucket compared with the oceans of summer and winter visitors to the
Adirondacks and Florida, Manitoba Springs and the coast of Maine, the
Catskills and Long Branch, Newport and Lenox, Bar Harbor and
California, White Sulphur Springs and the Minnesota Lakes, Saratoga
and Richfield, The Thousand Isles and Martha's Vineyard, Niagara and
Trenton Falls, Old Point Comfort and Asheville, the Yellowstone and
the Yosemite, Alaska and the Hot Springs of Arkansas. And everywhere
that the season's visitor is expected he will find hotels awaiting him
that range all the way from reasonable comfort to outrageous
magnificence; while a simpler taste will find a plain boarding-house