The crowning peculiarity of the new hotels is “The Bridal Chamber;” the want of delicacy that suggested the idea is only equalled by the want of taste with which it is carried out.  Fancy a modest girl, having said “Yes,” and sealed the assertion in the solemn services of the Church, retiring to the bridal chamber of the St. Nicholas!  In the first place, retiring to an hotel would appear to her a contradiction in terms; but what would be her feelings when she found the walls of her apartment furnished with fluted white silk and satin, and in the centre of the room a matrimonial couch, hung with white silk curtains, and blazing with a bright jet of gas from each bed-post!  The doors of the sleeping-rooms are often fitted with a very ingenious lock, having a separate bolt and keyhole on each side, totally disconnected, and consequently, as they can only be opened from the same side they are fastened, no person, though possessed of a skeleton key, is able to enter.  The ominous warning, “Lock your door at night,” which is usually hung up, coupled with the promiscuous society frequently met in large hotels, renders it most advisable to use every precaution.

Many hotels have a Bible in each bed-room, the gift of some religious community in the city; those that I saw during my travels were most frequently from the Presbyterians.

Having given you some details of an American first-class hotel in a large city, you will perhaps be better able to realize the gigantic nature of these establishments when I tell you that in some of them, during the season, they consume, in one way and another, DAILY, from fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds of meats, and from forty-five to fifty pounds of tea, coffee, &c., and ice by the ton, and have a corps of one hundred and fifty servants of all kinds.  Washing is done in the hotel with a rapidity little short of marvellous.  You can get a shirt well washed, and ready to put on, in nearly the same space of time as an American usually passes under the barber’s hands.  The living at these hotels is profuse to a degree, but, generally speaking, most disagreeable:  first, because the meal is devoured with a rapidity which a pack of fox-hounds, after a week’s fast, might in vain attempt to rival; and, secondly, because it is impossible to serve up dinners for hundreds without nine-tenths thereof being cold.  The best of the large hotels I dined at in New York, as regards cuisine, &c., was decidedly the New York Hotel; but by far the most comfortable was the one I lived in—­Putnam’s, Union-square—­which was much smaller and quite new, besides being removed from the racket of Broadway.