If there is a feeling akin to Heaven, it is to reach home after a long journey. And this I take to be quite consistent with great enjoyment of all the beautiful things and places one has seen in one's absence—aye, and people, too. To sit down in your own dear old chair, and kick your slippers across the room; to talk without being overheard; to eat with only those whom you love about you—for this promiscuous hotel-feeding is repulsive to me beyond the power of expression. I think I am peculiar on this point, but it seems to me as great an individual profanation as to admit the same number of people to see you perform your toilette for dinner. That there are people to whom it is one of the delights of travel to sit down to such hecatombs of food with such a menagerie of human beings, I am well aware. I am not one of them.
The first place we visited was Saratoga; don't be frightened. I leave "New York correspondents" of newspapers all over the country to give fabulous accounts of fabulous belles, and the number of their lovers, which will very generally be found to correspond with the number of their trunks. I am not going to venture on so hackneyed a theme, hotel life being the same at Saratoga as anywhere else—simply one eternal dress and eat. The place itself was what I went to see—the springs—the grounds—not the peacocks that were in them. The ornamental grounds attached to the springs are very lovely and attractive, as well as faultlessly kept, affording abundant opportunities to sighing lovers and bread-and-butter maidens. Contrary to my expectations, I found the waters very palatable, though, were I compelled by fashion to wash down my morning orisons with ten or twelve tumblers full, I might change my mind. It is curious how long they have bubbled up there, as freely as now, the Indians having partaken of them a fabulous time back. The fountain might be made more attractive, did some pretty girl do the tumbler-dipping for visitors, instead of the matter-of-fact jacket and trousers who handed it to us—I merely throw this in as a suggestion. We stepped into a shop opposite the springs, to see the operation of bottling and corking the waters performed by machinery; the celerity with which this was accomplished was very gratifying to my Yankee chain-lightning notion of things, and being a Yankee, of course it was not out of my line to think what a very nice piece of property it must be to hold, for this and other palpable reasons. I trust all the sentimental Misses who have had "offers" over those tumblers of water will forgive me.
Stepping into one or two shops in the village, to hunt up some nick-nacks for a dear little girl at home, I encountered some familiar New York shop faces. One woman told me that she hired a shop there every year during the "season," and that many other New-Yorkers did the same, retreating again when the tide of fashion set cityward. They calculate rightly—the shopping mania never will be burned out of women while there is a timber left of her; and were there nothing but an old horse-blanket in the village, she would buy it, if she had to throw it away the next minute. I wish it to be understood that I do not share this furore of my sex, as I never enter a shop of my own free will, until my clothes show signs of dropping off my back unless replaced.
The lady visitors at Saratoga get themselves up most stunningly, to walk through the streets to the springs, with their white embroidered petticoats peeping from beneath their rainbow-colored silk morning-dresses, and black-lace veils thrown Spanish fashion over their heads, making unhandsome faces, if only refined, look picturesque. This annual wave of folly, said I, must send its ripples farther than the circumference of this village. I had hardly made the remark, before two barrel-shaped country lasses passed, with tawdry, cheap imitations in delaine of the Saratoga silk morning-dress, and with coarse black veils thrown round their sunburnt faces. It was a capital burlesque, though, I assure you, the maidens themselves were far from regarding it in that light.
The private cottages on the grounds of the hotel, for families and parties who choose to live by themselves, are nice little cosey affairs. This is a much pleasanter, and, to my mind, a much more civilized arrangement than living at the public hotel; but, as the execrable organ-grinder wouldn't stop playing for sixpence, so the landlord, knowing well the value of peace and quietness, charges accordingly.
From Saratoga we went the usual route to Lake George, performing the last miles by stage coach. That's nice, thought I,—a change of conveyance wonderfully eases the limbs—i.e., if they are not past easing. I was hasty;—a heavy rain set in, and came driving first into the windows, through which, at the risk of dislocating our elbows, we spread our umbrellas for spouts. Then the roof began to leak, and gentlemen shrugged the shoulders of their linen travelling coats, and whispered, "Rheumatism;" and ladies benevolently offered the corners of their travelling cloaks and shawls to the victims; and temporary plugs were made for the roof, of "The New York Times," which we found "would not hold water;" and night came on, and the rain grew more persistent, and we got accustomed to sitting in a puddle; and the wheels sank in the mud, and the old coach "tetered"—as the children say—now this side, now that, and the most inveterate joker of the party had long been dumb; when the coachman, who had been jogging on in a helpless, despairing way, gave his whip the professional crack, which sent our noses up to the roof for a last final rub, and the wet, draggled, muddy, hungry, dead-and-alive crew were dragged out piecemeal over the wheels of the coach, on to the piazza of the "Fort William Henry Hotel," where were a swarm of colored waiters, where was a band of music on the piazza, where was a sumptuous parlor of interminable length—mirror, tête-à-tête, and piano. But, unfortunately, none of all those could we eat or drink. Woman wants but little here below, but I'll tell all you landlords what she does want. After sitting in a puddle, beside enduring a shower-bath at the same time through the roof of the coach, a hot cup of tea it might not be unreasonable for her to expect. It is very well for men to "pooh!"—they can afford to be philosophical—they who run to the bar-room and get "set up," as they call it, on their arrival, or console themselves for cold tea, sour berries, and tough beefsteak, with the infallible cigar.
The question is how their philosophy would hold out if there were no cigars to be had, and no bar-room, and they were shaking in an ague of cold? I hate a fussy woman who is always digging down to the bottom of hotel salt-cellars, and microscopically inspecting potatoes; but I will say, that when every thread of a woman's raiment is dripping, it takes a more angelic being than I am to go shivering to bed on a cup of cold tea, past an army of darkies whom you are too vexed with their employer to bribe.
The next morning it still rained, and as there was no inducement in-doors to remain, our breakfast being worse than our tea of the night before, we made our escape into the little steamer "Minnehaha" to see Lake George; and lovely it was, spite of fog, and mist, and rain, as we glided away between its green shores, and past its fairy islands, startling out the little birds from their leafy nests into short, swift circles over our heads, then back again, where never perhaps, since the creation, man's foot has trod.
Lake George is a little gem, though we saw it only through a vale of mist, the sun absolutely refusing to brighten it up for one brief moment. "Such a pity. It must be surpassingly lovely on a fine day," we all kept saying to one another, as we anxiously watched the gray clouds. Everybody seemed to be in good spirits, however, and some ladies, more romantic than wise, took their stations on the upper deck, spite of the slanting rain and mist, giving their gentlemen friends constant employment in tucking shawls round their feet and shoulders, till they looked like bandaged mummies. After a while they came down, and I saw certain mysterious-looking flasks drawn from the aforementioned gentlemen's pockets, and held to their blue lips, by which token I concluded that brandy sometimes does for a woman what sentiment will not.
And now again the old lumbering stage-coach is in requisition for a seven-mile jog, and trot, and plough through the mud, and we pack in, like layers of herring, and there is plenty of joking and laughing, for many of the party are young and merry, and it was blessed to listen to their ringing laughter, and look upon their bright eyes. Many a good thing was said, though had it not been half as good, we were all prepared to laugh upon the slightest provocation, for our legs and arms were bundled up in such a way, as rendered "dignity" quite out of the question, and gravity an impossibility. At last we arrived (I declare I believe they called the thing a "hotel") at the foot of Lake Champlain, where we were to dine. "Be advised by me," said one of the lady passengers to me, "and don't go in to dinner. I did it once, and since, when I stop here, I bring my own sandwiches." It is sometimes fun to sit down to a two-pronged-fork dinner, and the rest of us were in the humor for whatsoever the gods sent, so in we went. The staple commodities of the table were soft huckleberries and fried fish. Two girls—daughters, I suppose, of our host—waited upon table; that is to say, they rotated in a certain ghostly fashion, with their arms hanging by their sides, and their eyes fixed upon the floor, and were about as much use as two statues on castors, as it was impossible to catch either their eyes or attention. "What on earth is a fellow to call them?" asked one hungry man. "Waiter!"—that didn't appeal to them. "Girl!" it was no use. "You, there!" in a tone of impatience. The rock of Gibraltar couldn't have stood it better.