could make them; the beds were comfortable and fragrant; the linen was spotless; there was lots of “hanging room;” each pair of bedrooms shared a bathroom; the cuisine was good and sufficiently varied; the waiters were attentive; flowers were abundant without and within.  The price of all this real luxury was $3 to $3.50 (12_s._ to 14_s._) a day.  Possibly the absolute perfection of the bright and soft Californian spring when I visited Monterey, and the exquisite beauty of its environment, may have lulled my critical faculties into a state of unusual somnolence; but when I quitted the Del Monte Hotel I felt that I was leaving one of the most charming homes I had ever had the good fortune to live in.

The only hotel that to my mind contests with the Del Monte the position of the best hotel in the North American continent is the Canadian Pacific Hotel at Banff, in the National Rocky Mountains Park of Canada.  Here also magnificent scenery, splendid weather, and moderate charges combined to bias my judgment; but the residuum, after all due allowance made for these factors, still, after five years, assures me of most unusual excellence.  Two things in particular I remember in connection with this hotel.  The one is the almost absolute perfection of the waiting, carried on by gentlemanly youths of about eighteen or twenty, who must, I think, have formed the corps d’elite of the thousands of waiters in the service of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  The marvellous speed and dexterity with which they ministered to my wants, the absolutely neat and even dainty manner in which everything was done by them, and their modest readiness to make suggestions and help one’s choice (always to the point!) make one of the pleasantest pictures of hotel life lurking in my memory.  The other dominant recollection of the Banff Hotel is the wonderfully beautiful view from the summer-house at its northeast corner.  Just below the bold bluff on which this hotel stands the piercingly blue Bow River throws itself down in a string of foaming white cataracts to mate with the amber and rapid-rushing Spray.  The level valley through which the united and now placid stream flows is carpeted with the vivid-red painter’s brush, white and yellow marguerites, asters, fireweed, golden-rod, and blue-bells; to the left rise the perpendicular cliffs of Tunnel Mountain, while to the right Mt.  Rundle lifts its weirdly sloping, snow-flecked peaks into the azure.

In the dense green woods of the Adirondacks, five miles from the nearest high road on the one side and on the other lapped by an ocean of virgin forest which to the novice seems almost as pathless as the realms of Neptune, stands the Adirondack Lodge, probably one of the most quaint, picturesque little hotels in the world.  It is tastefully built in the style of a rustic log-hut, its timber being merely rough-hewn by the axe and not reduced to monotonous symmetry by the saw-mill.  It is roofed with bark, and its