for a few days. Of course there is nobody here. Will you take
me to the spring? Yes, Congress. I'm too old to change. If I believed
the pamphlets the proprietors write about each other's springs I should
never go to either of them."

Mrs. Bartlett Glow was not alone in saying that nobody was there. There
were scores of ladies at each hotel who said the same thing, and who
accounted for their own presence there in the way she did. And they were
not there at all in the same way they would be later at Lenox. Mrs.
Pendragon, of New Orleans, who was at the United States, would have said
the same thing, remembering the time when the Southern colony made a very
distinct impression upon the social life of the place; and the Ashleys,
who had put up at the Congress Hall in company with an old friend, a
returned foreign minister, who stuck to the old traditions--even the
Ashleys said they were only lookers-on at the pageant.

Paying their entrance, and passing through the turnstile in the pretty
pavilion gate, they stood in the Congress Spring Park. The band was
playing in the kiosk; the dew still lay on the flowers and the green
turf; the miniature lake sparkled in the sun. It is one of the most
pleasing artificial scenes in the world; to be sure, nature set the great
pine-trees on the hills, and made the graceful little valley, but art and
exquisite taste have increased the apparent size of the small plot of
ground, and filled it with beauty. It is a gem of a place with a
character of its own, although its prettiness suggests some foreign Spa.
Groups of people, having taken the water, were strolling about the
graveled paths, sitting on the slopes overlooking the pond, or wandering
up the glen to the tiny deer park.

"So you have been at the White Sulphur?" said Mrs. Glow. "How did you
like it?"

"Immensely. It's the only place left where there is a congregate social
life."

"You mean provincial life. Everybody knows everybody else."

"Well," King retorted, with some spirit, "it is not a place where people
pretend not to know each other, as if their salvation depended on it."

"Oh, I see; hospitable, frank, cordial-all that. Stanhope, do you know,
I think you are a little demoralized this summer. Did you fall in love
with a Southern belle? Who was there?"

"Well, all the South, pretty much. I didn't fall in love with all the
belles; we were there only two weeks. Oh! there was a Mrs. Farquhar
there."

"Georgiana Randolp