to single gentlemen.  Put into these single-room barracks, which were neat but exceedingly primitive in their accommodations, by hilarious negro attendants who appeared to regard life as one prolonged lark, and who avowed that there was no time of day or night when a mint-julep or any other necessary of life would not be forthcoming at a moment’s warning, the beginning of their sojourn at “The White” took on an air of adventure, and the two strangers had the impression of having dropped into a garrison somewhere on the frontier.  But when King stepped out upon the gallery, in the fresh summer morning, the scene that met his eyes was one of such peaceful dignity, and so different from any in his experience, that he was aware that he had come upon an original development of watering-place life.

The White Sulphur has been for the better part of a century, as everybody knows, the typical Southern resort, the rendezvous of all that was most characteristic in the society of the whole South, the meeting-place of its politicians, the haunt of its belles, the arena of gayety, intrigue, and fashion.  If tradition is to be believed, here in years gone by were concocted the measures that were subsequently deployed for the government of the country at Washington, here historic matches were made, here beauty had triumphs that were the talk of a generation, here hearts were broken at a ball and mended in Lovers’ Walk, and here fortunes were nightly lost and won.  It must have been in its material conditions a primitive place in the days of its greatest fame.  Visitors came to it in their carriages and unwieldy four-horse chariots, attended by troops of servants, making slow but most enjoyable pilgrimages over the mountain roads, journeys that lasted a week or a fortnight, and were every day enlivened by jovial adventure.  They came for the season.  They were all of one social order, and needed no introduction; those from Virginia were all related to each other, and though life there was somewhat in the nature of a picnic, it had its very well-defined and ceremonious code of etiquette.  In the memory of its old habitues it was at once the freest and the most aristocratic assembly in the world.  The hotel was small and its arrangements primitive; a good many of the visitors had their own cottages, and the rows of these cheap structures took their names from their occupants.  The Southern presidents, the senators, and statesmen, the rich planters, lived in cottages which still have an historic interest in their memory.  But cottage life was never the exclusive affair that it is elsewhere; the society was one body, and the hotel was the centre.