welve, get to your quarters at one, and have your baggage delivered to
you at two o'clock in the morning?" The friends were lodged in "Paradise
Row"--a whimsical name given to one of the quarters assigned to single
gentlemen. Put into these single-room barracks, which were neat but
exceedingly primitive in their accommodations, by hilarious negro
attendants who appeared to regard life as one prolonged lark, and who
avowed that there was no time of day or night when a mint-julep or any
other necessary of life would not be forthcoming at a moment's warning,
the beginning of their sojourn at "The White" took on an air of
adventure, and the two strangers had the impression of having dropped
into a garrison somewhere on the frontier. But when King stepped out
upon the gallery, in the fresh summer morning, the scene that met his
eyes was one of such peaceful dignity, and so different from any in his
experience, that he was aware that he had come upon an original
development of watering-place life.

The White Sulphur has been for the better part of a century, as everybody
knows, the typical Southern resort, the rendezvous of all that was most
characteristic in the society of the whole South, the meeting-place of
its politicians, the haunt of its belles, the arena of gayety, intrigue,
and fashion. If tradition is to be believed, here in years gone by were
concocted the measures that were subsequently deployed for the government
of the country at Washington, here historic matches were made, here
beauty had triumphs that were the talk of a generation, here hearts were
broken at a ball and mended in Lovers' Walk, and here fortunes were
nightly lost and won. It must have been in its material conditions a
primitive place in the days of its greatest fame. Visitors came to it in
their carriages and unwieldy four-horse chariots, attended by troops of
servants, making slow but most enjoyable pilgrimages over the mountain
roads, journeys that lasted a week or a fortnight, and were every day
enlivened by jovial adventure. They came for the season. They were all
of one social order, and needed no introduction; those from Virginia were
all related to each other, and though life there was somewhat in the
nature of a picnic, it had its very well-defined and ceremonious code of
etiquette. In the memory of its old habitues it was at once the freest
and the most aristocratic assembly in the world. The hotel was small and
its arrangements primitiv