Many other American hotels suggest themselves to me as sufficiently individual in character to discriminate them from the ruck.  Such are the Hygieia at Old Point Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton Roads, where the “Merrimac” wrought devastation to the vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret-ship “Monitor;” the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, or the population of a small town, while the three largest have together room for five thousand people; the hotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and aristocracy of the South, and still furnishing the eligible stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners; the Stockbridge Inn in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet high; the colossal Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen on the tenth floor; and the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and resonant central court.  Enough has, however, been said to show that all American hotels are not the immense and featureless barracks that many Europeans believe, but that they also run through a full gamut of variety and character.

The restaurant is by no means such an institution in the United States as in the continental part of Europe; in this matter the American habit is more on all fours with English usage.  The cafe of Europe is, perhaps, best represented by the piazza.  Of course there are numerous restaurants in all the larger cities; but elsewhere the traveller will do well to stick to the meals at his hotel.  The best restaurants are often in the hands of Germans, Italians, or Frenchmen.  This is conspicuously so at New York.  Delmonico’s has a worldwide reputation, and is undoubtedly a good restaurant; but it may well be questioned whether the New York estimate of its merits is not somewhat excessive.  If price be the criterion, it has certainly few superiors.  The a la carte restaurants are, indeed, all apt to be expensive for the single traveller, who will find that he can easily spend eight to twelve shillings on a by no means sumptuous meal.  The French system of supplying one portion for two persons or two portions for three is, however, in vogue, and this diminishes the cost materially.  The table d’hote restaurants, on the other hand, often give excellent value for their charges.  The Italians