We have been here a week now, and this morning I found out that all the water we drink at this hotel is brought from the well of St. Ann, where the public pump is, and everybody drinks just as much of it as they want whenever they want to, and they never think of any such thing as feeling badly or better than if it was common water.  The only difference is, that it isn’t quite as lukewarm when we get it here as it is at the well.  When I was told this I was real mad, after all the measuring and fussing we had had when taking the water as a medicine, and then drinking it just as we pleased at the table.  But the people here tell me that it is the gas in it which makes it medicinal, and when that floats out it is just like common water.  That may be; but if there’s a penny’s worth of gas in every tumbler of water sold in the pump-room, there ought to be some sort of a canopy put over the town to catch what must escape in the pourings and pumpings, for it’s too valuable to be allowed to get away.  If it’s the gas that does it, a rheumatic man anchored in a balloon over Buxton, and having the gas coming up unmixed to him, ought to be well in about two days.

When Jone told me his first bath was to be heated up to ninety-four degrees I said to him that he’d be boiled alive, but he wasn’t; and when he came home he said he liked it.  Everything is very systematic in the great bathing-house.  The man who tends to Jone hangs up his watch on a little stand on the edge of the bathtub, and he stays in just so many minutes, and when he’s ready to come out he rings a bell, and then he’s wrapped up in about fourteen hot towels, and sits in an armchair until he’s dry.  Jone likes all this, and says so much about it that it makes me want to try it too; though as there isn’t any reason for it I haven’t tried them yet.

This is an awfully queer, old-fashioned town, and must have been a good deal like Bath in the days of Evelina.  There is a long line of high buildings curved like a half moon, which is called the Crescent, and at one end of this is a pump-room, and at the other are the natural baths, where the water is just as warm as when it comes out of the ground, which is eighty-two degrees.  This is said to chill people; but from what I remember about summer time I don’t see how eighty-two degrees can be cold.

Opposite the Crescent is a public park called The Slopes, and farther on there are great gardens with pavilions, and a band of music every day, and a theatre, and a little river, and tennis courts, and all sorts of things for people who haven’t anything to do with their time, which is generally the case with folks at rheumatic watering-places.  Opposite to our hotel is a bowling court, which they say has been there for hundreds of years, and is just as hard and smooth as a boy’s slate.  The men who play bowls here are generally those who have got over the rheumatism of their youth, and whose joints have not been very much stiffened up yet by old age.  The people who are yet too young for rheumatism, and have come here with their families, play tennis.