ballroom, and a drawing-room of imposing dimensions.
Hotel and cottages together, it is said, can lodge fifteen hundred
guests.

The natural beauty of the place is very great, and fortunately there is
not much smart and fantastic architecture to interfere with it. I cannot
say whether the knowledge that Irene was in one of the cottages affected
King's judgment, but that morning, when he strolled to the upper part of
the grounds before breakfast, he thought he had never beheld a scene of
more beauty and dignity, as he looked over the mass of hotel buildings,
upon the park set with a wonderful variety of dark green foliage, upon
the elevated rows of galleried cottages marked by colonial simplicity,
and the soft contour of the hills, which satisfy the eye in their
delicate blending of every shade of green and brown. And after an
acquaintance of a couple of weeks the place seemed to him ravishingly
beautiful.

King was always raving about the White Sulphur after he came North, and
one never could tell how much his judgment was colored by his peculiar
experiences there. It was my impression that if he had spent those two
weeks on a barren rock in the ocean, with only one fair spirit for his
minister, he would have sworn that it was the most lovely spot on the
face of the earth. He always declared that it was the most friendly,
cordial society at this resort in the country. At breakfast he knew
scarcely any one in the vast dining-room, except the New Orleans and
Richmond friends with whom he had a seat at table. But their
acquaintance sufficed to establish his position. Before dinner-time he
knew half a hundred; in the evening his introductions had run up into the
hundreds, and he felt that he had potential friends in every Southern
city; and before the week was over there was not one of the thousand
guests he did not know or might not know. At his table he heard Irene
spoken of and her beauty commented on. Two or three days had been enough
to give her a reputation in a society that is exceedingly sensitive to
beauty. The men were all ready to do her homage, and the women took her
into favor as soon as they saw that Mr. Meigs, whose social position was
perfectly well known, was of her party. The society of the White Sulphur
seems perfectly easy of access, but the ineligible will find that it is
able, like that of Washington, to protect itself. It was not without a
little shock that King heard the good points, the style, the