The height of the season was over, she said; there had been tableaux and charades, and broom-drills, and readings and charity concerts.  Now the season was on the sentimental wane; every night the rooms were full of whist-players, and the days were occupied in quiet strolling over the hills, and excursions to Cooperstown and Cherry Valley and “points of view,” and visits to the fields to see the hop-pickers at work.  If there were a little larking about the piazzas in the evening, and a group here and there pretending to be merry over tall glasses with ice and straws in them, and lingering good-nights at the stairways, why should the aged and rheumatic make a note of it?  Did they not also once prefer the dance to hobbling to the spring, and the taste of ginger to sulphur?

Of course the raison d’etre of being here is the sulphur spring.  There is no doubt of its efficacy.  I suppose it is as unpleasant as any in the country.  Everybody smells it, and a great many drink it.  The artist said that after using it a week the blind walk, the lame see, and the dumb swear.  It renews youth, and although the analyzer does not say that it is a “love philter,” the statistics kept by the colored autocrat who ladles out the fluid show that there are made as many engagements at Richfield as at any other summer fair in the country.

There is not much to chronicle in the peaceful flow of domestic life, and, truth to say, the charm of Richfield is largely in its restfulness.  Those who go there year after year converse a great deal about their liking for it, and think the time well spent in persuading new arrivals to take certain walks and drives.  It was impressed upon King that he must upon no account omit a visit to Rum Hill, from the summit of which is had a noble prospect, including the Adirondack Mountains.  He tried this with a walking party, was driven back when near the summit by a thunder, storm, which offered a series of grand pictures in the sky and on the hills, and took refuge in a farmhouse which was occupied by a band of hop-pickers.  These adventurers are mostly young girls and young men from the cities and factory villages, to whom this is the only holiday of the year.  Many of the pickers, however, are veterans.  At this season one meets them on all the roads, driving from farm to farm in lumber wagons, carrying into the dull rural life their slang, and “Captain Jinks” songs, and shocking free manners.  At the great hop fields they lodge all together in big barracks, and they make lively for the time whatever farmhouse they occupy.  They are a “rough lot,” and need very much the attention of the poet and the novelist, who might (if they shut their eyes) make this season as romantic as vintage-time on the Rhine, or “moonshining” on the Southern mountains.  The hop field itself, with its tall poles draped in graceful vines which reach from pole to pole, and hang their yellowing fruit in pretty festoons and arbors, is much more picturesque than the vine-clad hills.