When we alighted, weary, at the gate of the pretty hotel, which crowns a gentle hill and commands a pleasing, evergreen prospect of many gentle hills, a mile or so below the works, and wholly removed from all sordid associations, we were at the point of willingness that the whole country should be devastated by civilization.  In the local imagination this hotel of the company is a palace of unequaled magnificence, but probably its good taste, comfort, and quiet elegance are not appreciated after all.  There is this to be said about Philadelphia,—­and it will go far in pleading for it in the Last Day against its monotonous rectangularity and the babel-like ambition of its Public Building,—­that wherever its influence extends, there will be found comfortable lodgings and the luxury of an undeniably excellent cuisine.  The visible seal that Philadelphia sets on its enterprise all through the South is a good hotel.

This Cottage Beautiful has on two sides a wide veranda, set about with easy chairs; cheerful parlors and pretty chambers, finished in native woods, among which are conspicuous the satin stripes of the cucumber-tree; luxurious beds, and an inviting table ordered by a Philadelphia landlady, who knows a beefsteak from a boot-tap.  Is it “low” to dwell upon these things of the senses, when one is on a tour in search of the picturesque?  Let the reader ride from Abingdon through a wilderness of cornpone and rusty bacon, and then judge.  There were, to be sure, novels lying about, and newspapers, and fragments of information to be picked up about a world into which the travelers seemed to emerge.  They, at least, were satisfied, and went off to their rooms with the restful feeling that they had arrived somewhere and no unquiet spirit at morn would say “to horse.”  To sleep, perchance to dream of Tatem and his household cemetery; and the Professor was heard muttering in his chamber,

  “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
   The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
   But then begins a journey in my head,
   To work my mind, when body’s work’s expir’d.”

The morning was warm (the elevation of the hotel must be between twenty-five hundred and three thousand feet), rainy, mildly rainy; and the travelers had nothing better to do than lounge upon the veranda, read feeble ten-cent fictions, and admire the stems of the white birches, glistening in the moisture, and the rhododendron —­trees, twenty feet high, which were shaking off their last pink blossoms, and look down into the valley of the Doe.  It is not an exciting landscape, nothing bold or specially wild in it, but restful with the monotony of some of the wooded Pennsylvania hills.