ularity and the babel-like
ambition of its Public Building,--that wherever its influence
extends, there will be found comfortable lodgings and the luxury of
an undeniably excellent cuisine. The visible seal that Philadelphia
sets on its enterprise all through the South is a good hotel.

This Cottage Beautiful has on two sides a wide veranda, set about
with easy chairs; cheerful parlors and pretty chambers, finished in
native woods, among which are conspicuous the satin stripes of the
cucumber-tree; luxurious beds, and an inviting table ordered by a
Philadelphia landlady, who knows a beefsteak from a boot-tap. Is it
"low" to dwell upon these things of the senses, when one is on a tour
in search of the picturesque? Let the reader ride from Abingdon
through a wilderness of cornpone and rusty bacon, and then judge.
There were, to be sure, novels lying about, and newspapers, and
fragments of information to be picked up about a world into which the
travelers seemed to emerge. They, at least, were satisfied, and went
off to their rooms with the restful feeling that they had arrived
somewhere and no unquiet spirit at morn would say "to horse." To
sleep, perchance to dream of Tatem and his household cemetery; and
the Professor was heard muttering in his chamber,

"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expir'd."

The morning was warm (the elevation of the hotel must be between
twenty-five hundred and three thousand feet), rainy, mildly rainy;
and the travelers had nothing better to do than lounge upon the
veranda, read feeble ten-cent fictions, and admire the stems of the
white birches, glistening in the moisture, and the rhododendron
--trees, twenty feet high, which were shaking off their last pink
blossoms, and look down into the valley of the Doe. It is not an
exciting landscape, nothing bold or specially wild in it, but restful
with the monotony of some of the wooded Pennsylvania hills.

Sunday came up smiling, a lovely day, but offering no church
privileges, for the ordinance of preaching is only occasional in this
region. The ladies of the hotel have, however, gathered in the
valley a Sunday-school of fifty children from the mountain cabins. A
couple of rainy days, with the thermometer rising to 80 deg.,
combined with natural laziness to detain the travelers in this
cottage of ease. They e