mes I had ever had the good fortune to live in.

The only hotel that to my mind contests with the Del Monte the
position of the best hotel in the North American continent is the
Canadian Pacific Hotel at Banff, in the National Rocky Mountains Park
of Canada. Here also magnificent scenery, splendid weather, and
moderate charges combined to bias my judgment; but the residuum, after
all due allowance made for these factors, still, after five years,
assures me of most unusual excellence. Two things in particular I
remember in connection with this hotel. The one is the almost absolute
perfection of the waiting, carried on by gentlemanly youths of about
eighteen or twenty, who must, I think, have formed the _corps d'elite_
of the thousands of waiters in the service of the Canadian Pacific
Railway. The marvellous speed and dexterity with which they ministered
to my wants, the absolutely neat and even dainty manner in which
everything was done by them, and their modest readiness to make
suggestions and help one's choice (always to the point!) make one of
the pleasantest pictures of hotel life lurking in my memory. The other
dominant recollection of the Banff Hotel is the wonderfully beautiful
view from the summer-house at its northeast corner. Just below the
bold bluff on which this hotel stands the piercingly blue Bow River
throws itself down in a string of foaming white cataracts to mate with
the amber and rapid-rushing Spray. The level valley through which the
united and now placid stream flows is carpeted with the vivid-red
painter's brush, white and yellow marguerites, asters, fireweed,
golden-rod, and blue-bells; to the left rise the perpendicular cliffs
of Tunnel Mountain, while to the right Mt. Rundle lifts its weirdly
sloping, snow-flecked peaks into the azure.

In the dense green woods of the Adirondacks, five miles from the
nearest high road on the one side and on the other lapped by an ocean
of virgin forest which to the novice seems almost as pathless as the
realms of Neptune, stands the Adirondack Lodge, probably one of the
most quaint, picturesque little hotels in the world. It is tastefully
built in the style of a rustic log-hut, its timber being merely
rough-hewn by the axe and not reduced to monotonous symmetry by the
saw-mill. It is roofed with bark, and its wide-eaved verandas are
borne by tree-trunks with the bark still on. The same idea is carried
out in the internal equipment, and the bark is left intact