wide-eaved verandas are borne by tree-trunks with the bark still on.  The same idea is carried out in the internal equipment, and the bark is left intact on much of the furniture.  The wood retains its natural colours, and there are no carpets or paint.  This charming little hotel is due to the taste or whim of a New York electrical engineer (the inventor, I believe, of the well-known “ticker"), who acts the landlord in such a way as to make the sixty or seventy inmates feel like the guests of a private host.  The clerk is a medical student, the very bell-boy ("Eddy”) a candidate for Harvard, and both mix on equal terms with the genial circle that collects round the bonfire lighted in front of the house every summer’s evening.  As one lazily lay there, watching the wavering play of the ruddy blaze on the dark-green pines, listening to the educated chatter of the boy who cleaned the boots, realising that a deer, a bear, or perchance even a catamount might possibly be lurking in the dark woods around, and knowing that all the material comforts of civilised life awaited one inside the house, one felt very keenly the genuine Americanism of this Arcadia, and thought how hard it would be to reproduce the effect even in the imagination of the European.

It was in this same Adirondack Wilderness that I stayed in the only hotel that, so far as I know, caught on to the fact that I was a “chiel amang them takin’ notes” for a guidebook.  With true American enterprise I was informed, when I called for my bill, that that was all right; and I still recall with amusement the incredulous and obstinate resistance of the clerk to my insistence on paying my way.  I hope that the genial proprietors do not attribute the asterisk that I gave the hotel to their well-meant efforts to give me quid pro quo, but credit me with a totally unbiassed admiration for their good management and comfortable quarters.

Mention has already been made (p. 30) of a hotel at a frequented watering-place, at which the lowest purchasable quantity of sleep cost one pound sterling.  It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller.  Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community that did not include a large class of individuals with literally more money than they knew what to do with, and desirous of any means of indicating their powers of expenditure.  It has been said of another hotel at Bar Harbor that “Anyone can stay there who is worth two millions of dollars, or can produce a certificate from the Recorder of New York that he is a direct descendant of Hendrik Hudson or Diedrich Knickerbocker.”