Our object in travelling is to see new countries, make pleasant excursions, climb mountains, &c.; and to attain that object, we must use the hotels as a convenience, as a sad necessity.
In Europe, the hotel is a means to an end.
In America, it is the end.
People travel hundreds, nay, thousands of miles for the pleasure of putting up at certain hotels. Listen to their conversation, and you will find it mainly turns, not upon the fine views they have discovered, or the excursions and walks they have enjoyed, but upon the respective merits of the various hotels they have put up at. Hotels are for them what cathedrals, monuments, ruins, and the beauties of Nature are for us.
In February, 1888, I went to see the Americans taking their pleasure in Florida. During the months of January, February, and March, flocks of society people from the great towns in the north go to Florida, where the sun is warm, and the orange trees are in full beauty of fruit and flower. Jacksonville and St. Augustine are in winter what Saratoga, Newport, and Long Branch are in summer: the rendezvous of all who have any pretension to a place in the fashionable world.
But what do they do at Jacksonville and St. Augustine, all these Americans in search of a "good time"? You think perhaps that in the morning they set out in great numbers to make long excursions into the country or on the water; that picnics, riding parties, and such out-of-door pastimes are organised.
Not so. They get up, breakfast, and make for the balconies or terraces of the hotels, there to rock themselves two or three hours in rocking-chairs until lunch time; after this they return to their rocking-chairs again and wait for dinner. Dinner over, they go to the drawing-rooms, where there are more rocking-chairs, and listen to an orchestra until bedtime. And yet, what pretty environs the little town of Jacksonville has, for instance! For miles around stretches a villa-dotted orange grove!
And the table d'hôte!
Oh! that table d'hôte!