Their expedition began with a theatre-party.  Bertie had engaged four boxes, and they met there, an hour or so after the performance had begun.  This made no difference, however, for the play was like the opera-a number of songs and dances strung together, and with only plot. enough to provide occasion for elaborate scenery and costumes.  From the play they were carried to the Grand Central Station, and a little before midnight Bertie’s private train set out on its journey.

This train was a completely equipped hotel.  There was a baggage compartment and a dining-car and kitchen; and a drawing-room and library-car; and a bedroom-car—­not with berths, such as the ordinary sleeping-car provides, but with comfortable bedrooms, furnished in white mahogany, and provided with running water and electric light.  All these cars were built of steel, and automatically ventilated:  and they were furnished in the luxurious fashion of everything with which Bertie Stuyvcsant had anything to do.  In the library-car there were velvet carpets upon the floor, and furniture of South American mahogany, and paintings upon the walls over which groat artists had laboured for years.

Bertie’s chef and servants were on board, and a supper was ready in the dining-car, which they ate while watching the Hudson by moonlight.  And the next morning they reached their destination, a little station in the mountain wilderness.  The train lay upon a switch, and so they had breakfast at their leisure, and then, bundled in furs, came out into the crisp pine-laden air of the woods.  There was snow upon the ground, and eight big sleighs waiting; and for nearly three hours they drove in the frosty sunlight, through most beautiful mountain scenery.  A good part of the drive was in Bertie’s “preserve,” and the road was private, as big signs notified one every hundred yards or so.

So at last they reached a lake, winding like a snake among towering hills, and with a huge baronial castle standing out upon the rocky shore.  This imitation fortress was the “camp.”

Bertie’s father had built it, and visited it only half a dozen times in his life.  Bertie himself had only been here twice, he said.  The deer were so plentiful that in the winter they died in scores.  Nevertheless there were thirty game-keepers to guard the ten thousand acres of forest, and prevent anyone’s hunting in it.  There were many such “preserves” in this Adiron-dack wilderness, so Montague was told; one man had a whole mountain fenced about with heavy iron railing, and had moose and elk and even wild boar inside.  And as for the “camps,” there were so many that a new style of architecture had been developed here—­to say nothing of those which followed old styles, like this imported Rhine castle.  One of Bertie’s crowd had a big Swiss chalet; and one of the Wallings had a Japanese palace to which he came every August—­a house which had been built from plans drawn in Japan, and by labourers imported especially from Japan.  It was full of Japanese ware—­furniture, tapestry, and mosaics; and the guides remembered with wonder the strange silent, brown-skinned little men who had laboured for days at carving a bit of wood, and had built a tiny pagoda-like tea-house with more bits of wood in it than a man could count in a week.