common at the faded resorts of the unhappy South, yet a pleasant
rurality is impressed on the entertainment. The principal hotel is
a vast building, curiously rambling in style: the dining-room, for
instance, is a house in itself, planted in a garden. Here, when the
family is somewhat small and select, will be presented the marvels of
Old Dominion cooking--the marrowy flannel-cake, the cellular waffle,
the chicken melting in a beatitude of cream gravy: when the house
is pressed with its hundreds of midsummer guests these choice
individualities of kitchen chemistry are not attainable; but even
then the bread, the roast, the coffee--a great _chef_ is known by
the quality of his simples--are of the true Fifth Avenue style
of excellence. Captain Potts (we have come to the lands where the
hotel-keepers are military officers), an old moustache of the Mexican
war, broods over the large establishment like the father of a great
family. With the men he is wise on a point of horseflesh or the
quality of the brandy; with the matrons he is courtly, gallant,
anecdotic: the young women appear to idolize him, and lean their
pretty elbows on his desk half the day, for he is their protector,
chevalier, entertainer, bonbon-holder, adviser and elder brother, all
in one. Such is the landlord, as that rare expert is understood in
the South. As for the regimen, it is the rarest kind of Pleasure made
Medicinal, and that must be the reason of its efficacy. There is a
superb pool of tepid water for the gentlemen to bathe in: a similar
one, extremely discreet, for the ladies. Besides these, of which
the larger is sixty feet long, there are individual baths, drinking
fountains in arbors, sulphur and iron springs, all close to the hotel.
The water, emerging all the year round at a temperature of about
seventy-five degrees, remains unfrozen in winter to the distance of a
mile or more along the rivulet by which it escapes. The flavor is so
little nauseous that the pure issue of the spring is iced for ordinary