Class. Book COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT / J"TJHK.?UD> W*C0J&LLS 18&20^5TD1^PLJ{!C R HEX) SPEI1TG, Saratoga Springs, N. Y. ED S Tilt NO water is the leading remedial mineral water of the country. It is celebrated for the cure of Eruptions of the Skin, Salt Rheum, Scrofula, Erysipelas, Inflamed Eyes, Granulated Eyelids, Dyspepsia, Catarri), Rheumatism, Kidney Disorders, and all diseases arising from impurities of the blood. RED SPRING I5^TIIS. The RED SPRING BATHS, owing to the alkaline properties of Red Spring water, are wonderfully efficacious in cure of Rheumatism ami other di -eases ari.-iug from an excess of acid in the system. Red Spring water, frush writer, Ditman's Sea-Salt, plunge and shower BATHS given at any temperature, at all irs of the dav and evening. Our bath-rooms, forty in number, are elegantly lined up and are kept scrupulously clean. Take the Red Spring Melt Line carriages for the Red Spring and Baths. Red S_pring water, sold only in bottles, is shipped everywhere. tW Send for circulars. KEI> SPRIXG CO., Saratoga Spring*, *.V. SARATOGA CHIPS AND Carlsbad Wafers. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AND HEALTH AT THE TWO GREAT MINERAL WATER RESORTS OF AMERICA AND EUROPE. i;y NATHAN 'SHEPPARD. AUTHOR OF "BEFORE AN AlTIKNl K ; " " SHUT UP IN PARIS;" EDITOR OF " GEORGE KLIOT'S ESSAYS;" " CHARACTER HEADINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT ;" "THE DICKKNS READER," AND "DARWINISM STATED UV DARWIN HIMSELF." ILLUSTRATED. FUNK & WAGNALLS, Publishers. NEW YORK : l8 & 20 ASTOR PLACE. I 887 LONDON : 44 FLEET STREET. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1887, By FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Slide and House of Saratoga Toboggan Club. . ..Frontispiece General Boulanger 12 ( )\ kkweight 21 " A Sight to See and a Scene to Kkmembeh" 28 The Sprudel— " How can You Doubt," etc Hi The Goddess Hygeia — " She Deiykn Away," etc The Poet Schiller at Carlsbad Bathjb op Caracalla 96 A Show ].i;-1'»\tii 108 RESIDENCE OF HON. GSOBGS S. BatcHELLKR 110 "Yaddo," Eesidence of Sfenceb Tease, Bsq 12o RESIDENCE OF S. GlFFORD Sliktm, Bsq 128 Residence of W. B. Gage, Esq 146 Residence of General W. B. French 162 Winter Cure for Malaria 171 A Winter Scene on Broadway, Saratoga SpBiNoe 17~> A Crack Shot 179 Residence of J. P. Gilson, Esq 182 Residence of Hon. C. S. Lester 198 11 Dinner's Ready, Sir !" 199 Residence of Dr. B. M. Kendall 210 " The Malarious Peruvian Hears," etc 222 A Mud Bath 233 Residence of E. T. Brackett, Esq 236 " Saratoga Has What can be Found," etc 237 " There is no Tonic for the System," etc 241 " The only Hope for the Human Family," etc 246 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. ' BEFORE AN AUDIENCE; OR, THE USE OF THE WILL IN PUBLIC SPEAKING. TALKS TO THE STUDENTS OE THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS AND THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. CONTENTS. PAGE These Chips and Wafers 9 From Saratoga to Cablsbad 13 The Carlsbad Treatment 85 Stray Wafers 43 All the Cures 81 All the Baths 93 Analytical Difficulties. 100 The Remedial Effect of Common-Sens] 119 From Cablsbad to Sabatog v 127 The Mineral- Water Tbeatment Hebe and Thebe. 145 The Saratoga Tbeatment 161 Flying Chits 181 The Saratoga Gayety Cube 197 Chips and Wafers 209 The Saratoga Winter Cure 235 SARATOGA CHIPS. THESE CHIPS AM) WAFERS. A neighbob who has a reputation worth preserv- ing for manufacturing Saratoga chips kindly con- tributes this recipe to this volume : Pure and slice thin eight white potatoes with a vegetable sheer. Let them soak about an hour in a pan of iced water, the colder the better. Drain and dry them on a cloth. Fry a small handful at a time in about three pints of hot lard in a deep kettle, stirring them constantly with a long-handled skimmer until they are crisp ; then take them out, and sprinkle them with salt. In winter and spring, when the potatoes are old, it will be necessary to soak them in water for half a day. The Chips that follow do not belong to the vege- table kingdom, and therefore could not be very well sliced by a " vegetable slicer," but they should have been simmered andskimmered until they were dry and crisp, and liberally sprinkled with chloride of sodium. That will give them a flavor which is designed to create an appetite for them, which can- 10 SARATOGA CHIPS. not be satisfied by them. The more you have of them, the more you will want of them. If the facts or truths out of which they are made should be very old or trite, or if they are diminutive potatoes and a limited number in a hill, all the more should they be soaked in mineral water. They may be overdone, or underdone, and they need not hang together. Their consistency may be question- able, and they may be as innocent of continuity as an after-dinner speech. They will be found all the more palatable and salable on that account. The lightest thoughts are often cooked with hot ink in a deep kettle. The Carlsbad Wafer is another ingenious attain- ment in the literary cuisine. The original is a cake about the size of the top of a silk hat, and about as thin as the hair under the hat. It is made chiefly of flour, sugar, the bark of vanilla and of cinna- mon. My Carlsbad medical doctor says, " That is all I know about it." If he is as good at a recipe as he is at a diagnosis, he can be depended upon for wafers as safely as for medical advice. Carlsbad wafers should not be too flowery or too sugary, and too much cinnamon may make them too spicy. While they should be thin, they should not be too thin, and while they should be sweet, they should not be so sweet as to be flat. They come twelve in a box, and more than that in the book, and they can be devoured all at once or one at a time. They are alike in size and flavor in the THESE CHIPS AXD WAFERS. 11 box, but differ in dimensions and constituents in the book, and may have no more to do with one another than the people who read them. They should be suggestive, and not exhaustive of either the subject or the reader. Whether Chips or Wafers, whether these chats and notes concern the renowned mineral- water re- sort of Europe or the equally famous national spa of America, they should be relishable and useful to the multitudes who gather there in pursuit of health, rest, or fun, vitalized air or mineralized water. If the author shall succeed in this purpose, no cook in the world will be happier than he, not only because he will benefit his readers, but because he will be of service to himself ; for then he may hope to replenish the purse that was depleted by the following tour. In that event he certainly never will regret taking that tour or repent of being the author of these Chips and Wafers. Saratoga Springs, May 1st, 1887. GENEBAL BOULANGEB, FBENCH MINISTEB OP WAB. FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. I went nearly all the way from Saratoga to Carls- bad in the AUer, of the German Lloyd. A new, rapid, clean, and well-captained steamer is the AUer, and the ocean calmed at her approach, so that fe\v of as missed our meals or lost (Mir temper. The voyage was without adventure or even inci- dent. There were no matrimonial contracts entered into and hut lew whales were seen. We had only one sunset and only one phosphorescent sea, but the Restless Club were on hoard from port to port, and. untied many a knotty question over their hard- tack and Apollinaris water. The Restless Club is never so much at home When it is at sea. Fairly upon the water, it feels itseli upon solid ground, since nowhere can it find its fundamental canon more opportune or pat — "Anywhere hut where we are; nothing can he worse than this." The sea is the mosl restless portion of the earth's surface, although it would he difficult to prove that it travels any faster around the sun or around its axis than the sands of New Jersey or the mud of Missouri. We are whirling heels over head through space at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. The uniformity with which Mr. Glauber's salts 14 SAEATOGA CHIPS. pervade the ocean is owing to its restlessness. If it should cease to be restless, its chloride of sodium would gather into a mass as big at the bottom as the Continent of Europe, and as high at the top as the top of Mont Blanc ; the mineral springs at Saratoga and Carlsbad and their advertisements would dry up, and there would be an additional duty placed upon chloride of sodium. Eestlessness is the normal condition of every- thing and everybody, a fact that would be evident i£ there were not a Normal School in the United States. If human nature is of a piece with the rest of nature, and that it is all nature cries aloud, it would naturally share in the restless disposition of the hurrying cloud and the darting swallow, imitat- ing the swallow not only in being always on the wing, but in being at its best when it is arrayed like a gentleman and a waiter. It was just as much restlessness that caused George Fox to wear his hat in the presence of the King as it is restlessness that keeps the hats of the Bohemians flying through the air at the approach of Francis Joseph and his retinue. Luther was restless, or he never would have thrown his inkstand at the devil, and Jennie Ged- des must have been, or she would not have flung her little stool at her preacher's head. Eestlessness invented printing, discovered chloro- form and America. If Columbus had stayed at FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 15 home, he never would have gone abroad. But for him the corrupt aborigines would be basking in the dark lantern of Liberty enlightening New York where the conscript fathers keep the noiseless tenor of their way on their way to Canada or Sing Sing. If Dante had remained upon earth to compose his verse, he would have found abundance of material in " these restless spirits, ever hurried on by the swift wings of" — cheap tickets. Beatrice would have been delighted to see Cook's drove tumbling over one another through the galleries and panting breathlessly up and down the Matterhorn. The Restless Club differs from all other clubs, whether serious or political. It acts upon the spur of the moment, or the spur of the mountain, in - sion or out of session, and it invariably acts for the greatest good of the smallest number, no matter how little may be gained. It boycotted the prunes on the steamer, and modi- tied their importunity, and ought to have done the same by the band in the corner of the cabin when it passed round its hat, since that would have been a fine opportunity for taking sides with the manly cause of Wages as against the sneaking cause of Gratuities. It frowned upon the young lady who thrust her table-knife down her pretty throat and imitated her husband in wearing a toothpick in her mouth between meals. It cleared up a mys- tery on board by which a certain couple were set 16 SARATOGA CHIPS. apart by the gossips as a runaway match, neither of whom had ever been divorced. Much to our annoyance, it was not even an unhappy match. I landed at Bremen. I had not been in Northern Europe for about one thousand years, when I was there in the loins of a Gothic barbarian in full dress, and in a physical condition that precluded the necessity of the Carlsbad Treatment. I imagine him a stately chief with tusks, smacking his chops over the broth of a boy that he sees cooking down in, Gaul, and presently he will descend upon the coasts of the Mediterranean and the British Isles, and plant himself there to grow into the silk hats and kid gloves that came over in the Aller to seek their health where he never lost his. Often as I had been in Europe, I had never seen Berlin — Berlin, the new capital of the mighty Ger- man, whither now all the tribes of the Teutons go up, sturdy and metaphysical, and full of beer and sauerkraut. I was with the French army that set out from Paris for Berlin in 1870, under the Na- poleonic son of the Dutch admiral, crying, Vive VEmpereur! and "Onto Berlin!" 1886! and 1 have just reached Berlin, and the French army has " fallen back for another spring, and a vigorous leap may shortly be the result." But the destruction of the statue of the great Frederick the Great by the troops of General Boulanger will never be the result. The only Frenchman who could carry the " Car of Victory," FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 17 or ride in it from Berlin to Paris, is still asleep under the gilded dome of the Invalides, and he had no Frencli blood in his veins ; but there has been more than one German capable of bringing it back and replacing it on the Brandenberg Gate, where I saw it decorated with the Eagle of Prussia and armed with the iron cross. You will be surprised to meet so frequently on the beautiful Untev den Linden the French phy- sique and accent. He is a descendant of the exile driven out by that crowned Beelzebub, horn's XIV., who seized in 1<;7<> the Lorraine, that in 1870 was reseized by Germany. Every European capital has its menagerie. You may enjoy your sanguinary reflections as you stroll among the tigers and wild cats at the Herlin Zoo <>r among the military effigies in the avenues and parks. Berlin is a camp of great commanders in bronze, while its gardens are fertile with the rank and file who followed them. Women come in on the im- posing statue of Frederick, to represent the virtues which never fail of votive offerings, however deli- cient they may be in military votaries — Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. The galleries, too, and the museums remind you perpetually of the method pursued by the human 18 SARATOGA CHIPS. carnivora for settling their disputes. Art and science are in league with the beasts of the field. Berlin has a garrison larger than the entire army and navy of the United States of America. Before you cross the street you must look both ways for cavalry, as in our quiet streets at home you must " look out for the locomotive when the whistle blows." I saw a troop of cavalry riding over a field cov- ered with women harvesting the grain. The women looked at the cavalry, the cavalry did not look at the women. Yes, one of the cavalrymen leered at one of the young women. Those peas- ants support those gay boys on horseback, and are trampled under foot of horse and man in return. A German who shared the scene with me said, " That is the curse of Germany. That makes me a Socialist. Strip those beggars of their lace and steel and send them home, and the common people would rise to something better ; but there is no hope for them, for those horses' heels are on their necks. ' ' Such are the Goths and Yandals and Angles at this day. A few of them are born on horseback, carbine in hand ; the rest are born under the horses' hoofs, with nothing in their hands or mouths. The claws of the baboon have evolved into the bayonets of man. While the jaguar and negro of Africa live in peace, except when they are roused and riled by an exploring expedition, the civilization of Europe is in a sanguinary ferment, while we are fortifying FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 10 oar coasts against, not the Hottentot or hyena, but our civilized fellow-creatures of " the same lan- guage, literature, and law," who may any night land upon our coast and overrun New Jersey. I was glad of the relief afforded by the shop- from these scenes and thoughts of carnage. N to veritable shopping with the ladies I enjoy look- ing into shop-windows for diversion and recreation. It is to be compared with a night's Bleep or a mountain climb. I asked a titled lady of ran; attainments what she thought of St. Petersburg, and her eves glistened as she exclaimed, ik Oh, miles and miles of shop- Europe still puts its shoe's out at the bedroom door in the evening, and finds them there in the morning polished. America warns you that they are not safe there any more. Von must leave them With the rest of your jewelry in the hotel safe. This gives Boots an opportunity to charge you ten cents every time you sit down on his throne, and he prostrates himself abjectly before you and trie your foot. Then he blows his breath upon it, and rubs it, and makes it shine till you can see your face in it. What a satisfaction to a poor devil to spend his last dime on his devotee at the blacking-box ! Our interrogative countryman turns up at every turn. I met this one on the train. 20 SARATOGA CHIPS. " How many children have you ?" " Eleven." " Oh ! I've only four, two girls and two boys. That's about the ticket for a family, you know. Let's see, by the way, who did you marry ?" " The great-granddaughter of George Washing- ton's first wife." " I want to know. Then, you are an American, ain't you ?" " Yes, on my stepmother's side." " Ah ! I knew you were an American. I never make a mistake on that racket, I can tell you." " Oh ! I misunderstood you. I thought you asked me if I were from South America." " Well, now. I want to know. So, then, you are a South American !" "Yes, on my granddaughter's side ; the rest is Scotch." "Yes? Well, do you know, I suspected there was Scotch blood on the inside of you the moment I laid eyes on you. What captain did you come over with ?" " Jinks — horse marines." ' ' How long do you intend to — " But by this time we had reached Dresden, and I took good care to select a different hotel from the one favored by my inquisitive countryman. The next day I saw him coming, and I started on the full run. So did he ; but I lost him just as I heard him bawl, " Where are you stopping ?" FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 21 The American of the United States never rests until lie knows where his fellow-American " stops'" and how much it costs him to live. '* Size him up" is the slang of it. The great Republic is im- pertinent. Monarchies do not care where you sleep or what you had for dinner, or, alas ! whether any- body except themselves had any dinner. There are intellectual swallow-tails at swell din- ner parties in London that came out of lodgings in the Strand. I spent two delightful days at Dresden, where 1 am told rich Americans go to live cheaply, and boast of it. Curious mania that of those who have more money than they know what to do with, seeking out ways and means and places for not spending it ! I spent some of my poverty in a teacup of Dres- den china, and then made the tour of the Dresden Gallery. The most interesting pictures of a gallery are those who are looking at them. I can quite understand Michael Angelo finding his Madonna on the roadside in Italy. An old German and his granddaughter inter- rupted my study of the Murillos. The little granddaughter hopped about, chirping and hum- ming to herself, while the grandfather gazed sol- emnly upon the ancient works of art. Put her in marble and stand her in a corner of this gallery, and everybody would stop to gaze, and wonder, and admire. Her nose, and neck, and mouth, and 22 SARATOGA CHIPS. chin, and ear, and forehead, and ankles were the perfection of sculptuary neatness. Her flaxen hair was like the tassel of the young corn for softness and gloss. She answered my smile with a smile of her own, showing her white and even teeth and her large, kind eyes of heavenly blue. She was all symmetry and grace. Best and worst of all — oh, happy, unhappy moment — she recalled what I had lost and made an old wound bleed afresh, and I hurried from her and from the wonderful gallery. "Sight-seeing for the sake of enumerating the ob- jects you have seen gets to be so dazing at last that it brings on paralysis of the optic nerve and de- lirium of the appreciative faculty. You get home to find yourself crammed with a tangled mass of unassorted and indigestible information. The good traveller is a ruminant. He lays away the landscape and the architecture, the odd charac- ter and the grand picture, the conversation and the street scene, to chew upon and digest in after times of leisure. Travelling promotes a mirageous imagination. His paradise is always just beyond the happy carpet- bagger. He can see it plainly. It may be an hal- lucination to others, it is a reality to him. He pursues a city in the sky or an island in the air. His city has no plumbers and his island no mias- FROM SARATOGA TO CARLSBAD. 23 mas. He will presently put up at an inn where the cooking is fit for the palate of the immortals and the beds such as permanently cure the weariness of the sons of men. The first impression of Carlsbad is very diverting. The Treatment begins with that sense of diversion in the Cur-guest from the United States of America. The narrow streets, the ancient-looking houses, the overhanging hills, the broad German faces, the picturesque petticoats of the ladies who have lus- cious plums for sale, the obsequiousness of Tips in full uniform, as he bids you welcome to the Hotel von Zwieback, the little bunch of a feather bed and the feather pillow about the size of your fist that have been handed down from the Slav of the Steppes of Tartary, who put up at this inn five hundred years ago— it is a droll old burgh and very fascinating, and in that fascination the Treatment takes root. You feel better already. The Treat- ment lias begun. " OVERWEIGHT." THE CARLSBAD TREAT- MENT. The Carlsbad Treatment is rational, flexible, and adroit. It is at once exacting and indulgent to the morbid vertebrate in his grapple with the innumerable maladies that grow with his growth in enlightenment and enfeeblement. First of all, a diagnosis. You are stripped and laid prone upon the sofa, and then you are in- formed how it is with your heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, in- testinal canal, your digestive apparatus, and your thinking apparatus. The report will be as abundant in tact as that of the phrenologist who catalogues your bumps or that of the gypsy who prog- nosticates your future and your fortune. Admonition is adroitly mixed with encouragement, military or- ders with words of friendly counsel, stern rebuke with 26 SARATOGA CHIPS. taffy. But have a care how you repeat the felici- tous or facetious phraseology of your diagnosis. One Cur-guest told another that her medical doctor had told her that her heart sounded like a church - bell, and that she would live for one hundred and thirty-two years for all there was the matter with her heart. " Why, that is exactly what he told me, word for word !" Fortified by your knowledge of your interior, and coached with reference to what you must do about it, you enter upon the far-famed Carlsbad Treat- ment, and it will do you no harm, meanwhile, to exclaim with Zola, " How jolly life is !" and agree with Kenan in calling this "an amusing age." The journey is worth all it costs, if it cures you of wanting to be cured. There is, of course, exceptional treatment for ex- ceptional " cases," which are sometimes so excep- tional that the Treatment is quarantine, banishment, or burial. We will not go into those " cases." For the common run of cases, for idiopathic dys- pepsia and dyspepsia that was not brought on by idiocy, it is fundamental that the patient or Cur- guest shall obey his physician in all things ; and for the common run of bad livers, and high livers, and American dyspeptics, this is about the latitude and longitude of the famous Carlsbad Treatment, as re- quired by the Carlsbad medical doctor, from whose decisions there is no appeal. A sight to see and a scene to remember. THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 29 Up, and dressed, and drinking at 6.30 a.m. You drink, and walk, and keep step to the music of the splendid band of experts in the magnificent Sprudel Colonnade, unless, indeed, your doctor exiles you to the Schlossbrunn, where you are lucky if you do not find two hundred and seventy-two people in the line ahead of you at 6.15 a.m. That line is a sight to see and a scene to remember, for in that line, passing down the stone steps to hand their cups to the agile little nymph at the spring, and pass- ing up and out on the opposite steps, is an enormous variety of the morbid vertebrata, pathetically and humorously suggestive to the last degree. A still larger and more entertaining variety you will see and join when you take your place in the promenade at the famous Sprudel Spring. There each is served in turn as the crowd gathers around the great circular reservoir, and has his cup dipped into the boiling crater at the end of a long pole by the small maiden, who is an adept with the dipper. By 6.30 a.m. the vast colonnade is crammed with people of all ages, sexes, nations, costumes, com- plexions, and diseases. Those who are too old or too infirm to join the promenade sit and sip upon the benches. The rest sip as they stroll along in silence, broken here and there by a chat in under- tone or by some of us foreigners in overtone. The flowers that bloom in profusion all about you are hardly more quiet in their demeanor than the vast 30 SARATOGA CHIPS. throng that are so careful not to injure or molest them. No behavior could be more in accord with the rules of etiquette to be found in the books or in the unwritten code of good society. One word to your adjoining Cur-guest, and he salutes you in a manner to gain your confidence at once. Fall into conversation with him, and he will overflow with information, and part with you as graciously as though you were his lifelong friend. If any one stares, he comes from the United Kingdom or the United States. The crowd continues to gather, and finally over- flows into the narrow streets and covers the bridge that spans the Tepel, which hurries along beneath your feet, as though impatient to escape from the volcano that snores under its waves. I never could quite get rid of the sensation at Carlsbad of under- going its Treatment in a boiler that might at any moment burst. If you have jolly companions — and you should have, if you wish to make the most of the Carlsbad Treatment — you will exchange comments on this wonderful human menagerie, with their odd and sad, their repelling and attractive and perplexing faces. This is part of the mental abstraction that constitutes a potent element in the efficacy of the Treatment. It is the Diversion Cure. You must walk for ten or fifteen minutes be- tween glasses, which are two, or three, or four in number, according to the advice of your doctor, THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 31 who also dictates the spring from which you are to drink, and without winking at you, either ! The springs differ in temperature rather than in constituents, and differ just enough to furnish the adroit faculty another opportunity for working the element of fussiness in the treatment of the morbid vertebrata. A fussy patient needs a fussy physi- cian, and never fails to find one. In about an hour or three quarters of an hour, say about 8 a.m., you sit down to your frugal break- fast out-of-doors ! Out-of-doors, out-of doors al- ways, if the weather will allow of it. Out-of-doors is a part of the Treatment. It is man, the only in- door animal, the only over-civilized animal, revert- ing to and resorting to the Open- Air Cure. It is living, and breathing, and having your being in the open air, where we used to live when we were lower down, and where branches of our own interesting human species live now in perfect health, without the aid of opiates, stimulants, or cathartics. A frugal break-the-fast it is to the present reign- ing family of native Americans, fresh from the land of multitudinous dishes and multifarious cuisine. The Treatment breakfast consists of one cup of milk, or tea, or coffee, a couple of soft-boiled eggs, and a roll, or some zwieback, which is simply bread re- baked, and a nutritious invention it is. The observing foreigner will observe that there is nothing novel or local about this Carlsbad break- fast. It is the breakfast of the Continent and the 32 SARATOGA CHIPS. islands adjacent thereunto. The great American breakfast is unknown out of the United. States of America. No European, biped or quadruped, car- nivorous or omnivorous, ever ate half an ox before noon. The Roman subdued, the world on goat's- milk breakfasts and the Briton on breakfasts of bacon and the worst cup of coffee known out of the almshouse. The Spartan did his lighting on cheese and olives. The Esquimau is easily licked, because he lives on fat, and is all blubber. Between breakfast and dinner the Treatment walks you all over the glorious hills and under the sheltering trees that surround the quaint and curi- ous town ; or you may loiter about the pretty shop- windows, and amuse yourself and annoy the shop- keeper by asking the price of what you do not in- tend to buy ; or you may lounge on the benches of the parks or promenades and read a story of some human life, if not written by a harrowing French romancer or an exasperatingly minute novelist of the later American period, who reminds you of the chap with a microscope in his eye trying to find out what is the matter with your watch. You are forbidden to converse upon your busi- ness affairs, upon your ills, aches, or accidents, your mistakes, or misfortunes, or matrimonial misalli- ances. You must talk of cheerful matters. The mind must be kept away from itself and its taber nacle of clay. This is where the Mind Cure comes in. You go all the way to Carlsbad to bring it in THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 33 and carry it out. Perhaps you must get away from home to get away from yourself. Travel is an anti- dote of brooding. Leave off introspection, especially if that is really your only disease. Introspection breeds morbidity, and morbidity hypochondria, and the hypochon- driac sincerely believes that he may disobey God's laws if he is only employed in God's service. In his country's army he would not think of such a thing, or if he did, he would have only one oppor- tunity of trying it. Sincerity is the crank's curse and egotism the bane of the devout dyspeptic. Look unto the hills, and walk over the hills of Carls- bad, from whence cometh help in the very act of looking for it. In pursuance of cheerfulness you will not need to exclude that purveyor of bad news, the newspaper. It excludes itself. It gets so far behind that it never catches up. The English daily vexes the American from the United States, by omitting the bad news from the United States, while his es- teemed contemporaries of New York are so stale that it is too late for him to enjoy the first thrill of their horrible information, and he soon loses all in- terest in the runaway matches, the tariff on wool, and the election of boodleman in his native ward. If you are ordered to bathe in vapor, minerals, pine burrs, iron water, carbonic-acid gas, butter- milk, or mud, you will be expected to do so at about 10 a.m., when you are supposed to be regular 34 SARATOGA CHIPS. in pulse and serene in mind. Carlsbad prescribes Quakerism for the nervous system. You must study to be quiet, and mind your own business, especially now that you have no business of your own to mind. Carlsbad proclaims peace on earth to men of good will. If you are good-natured, you may bathe. The mud or moor bath is a half hour of your ex- istence upon earth spent up to your chin in the earth itself. The gritty black peat is impregnated with minerals, and heated according to the necessi- ties of your scrofula or gout, rheum or rheumatism, obstinacy or meanness. More of this in our chap- ter on Baths, At about one o'clock p.m. there is the eating of the second meal, under the banner of Moderation in All Things, which you never eat under at home, lest you should be deprived of the privilege of eat- ing under it four thousand miles away from home. The prodigal son comes to himself when he comes to the table at Carlsbad. That is the cunning of the Carlsbad Treatment. It brings one to one's self. It is a long way with some. You may have a soup for dinner, if not too rich, and any kind of fish, and any kind of meat, except pork. Some Americans have been turned back at the frontier on account of the laws interdicting " the American hog." You may have any kind of vegetables and any kind of fruit, if cooked. You may drink any of the table waters, or any one of THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 35 the light wines, or lager beer. Pilsiner beer is a favorite. Spirits (brandy and whiskey) are abso- lutely prohibited as a beverage, and are adminis- tered by the doctor of medicine very much as the knife is administered when amputation is neces- sary. Everything calculated to create acidity in the stom- ach, whether sweet or sour, whether a plum-pud- ding or a newspaper, is forbidden ; all spices, sauces, candies, fats and grease, and everything in the way of edible, beverage, or sensational novel that would give the digestive organs a sudden paroxysm of heat or chill. Ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, hot rolls and iced water would necessitate the reading of the riot act. An American from the United States who was exhibiting in the familiar pantomime of dining on lumps of ice and coals of fire was given till the next train time to leave town, and the pickle- eater was put into the pound with the lost pups. Butter is looked upon in Carlsbad with even more suspicion than it is in New York, while an order for oleomargarine renders a man liable to incarce- ration in Elbogen Castle, and the great American dessert of pie- crust, hickory-nuts, and toothpicks would incur the penalty of assault and battery, with intent to do away with the digestive apparatus en- tirely. No after-dinner nap, unless you are sufficiently far gone to have it prescribed by the humor-us doctor of medicine. You will not feel like nap- 30 SARATOGA CHIPS. ping. You have not eaten enough to make you feel like it. Over-eating is forbidden, and gorman- dizing, and guzzling, and bolting. You go to Carlsbad in order to learn to eat slow and chew small, and the lesson is worth all it costs in sea-sick- ness and home-sickness. For the first time in his life the rabid-transit American eater from the United States chews his food, and for the first time tastes it and relishes it. He can now distinguish tenderloin from terrapin, horse soup from mulli- catawny. For the first time, in consequence, the enfranchised citizen of the great Republic thinks with a clear brain, talks without hysterics, and sleeps without nightmare. I have invented a device for preventing the fatal habit of fast eating — a mirror so placed as to com- pel the eater to see himself swallow as others see him swallow — without chewing. Carlsbad has an eye to keeping an eye on the foreign patient, and securing the return of the pa- tient foreigner. He is to be managed. All Treat- ment, whether mineralogical or Thomsonian, is fish- ing for men with a net, and not with hook and line or procrustean bedsteads. Tact is the attainment for a physician. " Do you smoke ?" "Yes." "How many ?" " Nine cigars a day." " Make it three at once, then two, then one, then THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 37 none ! Nicotine does not go well with chloride of sodium." The Carlsbad Treatment is a weaning method. It weans the morbid mammal from his bottle with an- other bottle and allows him time for easing off from his Havanas, but he must be weaned or lost. Weaning is not weaning unless you are really weaned. The snuffer is disinfected and sequestered until the habit is abandoned and the nose restored to its original hue and proportions, while the Member of Congress who deliberately chews tobacco of his own free will and accord, and not as a punishment for crime, is compelled gently but sternly to stand and receive the contents of the hose of the steam fire- engine in his animated mouth. One complained that it took his breath away, and he was told that that was the object of it. As spitting is exclusively an American habit., it is forbidden only to Americans. All nations smoke, ours is the only one that spits while it smokes. The appetizing toothpick is not on the bill of fare, and the still more appetizing habit of using it behind the napkin, and sometimes not behind the napkin, does not yet prevail except in the United Kingdom, the United States, and among the United Order of Terra del Fuegians ! You are required to turn your mouth away from the table when you cough. You stroll, lounge, chat, or read till the hour for 38 SARATOGA CHIPS. tea, which comes at about 6 p.m., without bringing any tea with it. English is the only tongue in which the teapot sings. The Welsh are the only British who do not speak British who will get up in the middle of the night to take a cup of tea. The Germans don't know how to make it. The French despise it. My lady said to a Parisian lady, " Don't you ever drink tea?" " Oh, yes, when we wish to perspire." Carlsbad prescribes milk, beer, or vin ordinaire for the. evening meal, with the ever-recurring zwie- back and a ration of cold meat. You will read this bill of fare of a day at Carls- bad underestimating its indulgence, but when you come to try it you will be surprised to find it satis- factory, even to a gourmand. All its foods are good, and it is enough, and enough is as good as a feast. This is the Enough Cure. The evening of the Treatment dawns early and sets soon. At 6.30 the beautiful new theatre opens with a drama which is designed to amuse the Cur- guest, and it will do so, even if he does not under- stand a word of it. Pantomime is as much to some as the text is to others. If it is an opera on the boards, it will be as entertaining, even if it is as inarticulate, as the scientific melody in the choir-loft at home. The balls, and hops, and concerts all come off, and leave off early in the evening. Restrained amuse- THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 39 ment is a factor of the Treatment. It is the Pleas- ure Cure that you go four thousand miles from your home, sweet home, to try. But the pleasure is made for man, not man for pleasure — only ! The goddess Hygeia has taken away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments, the changeable suits of apparel, and the wimples and the crisping-pins. The Chinese Minister at Washington could attend the balls at Carlsbad without being shocked by the limited liability of the fashionable costume. Your Treatment is over for the day when you find yourself wrestling with the Dutch bedquilt for the night. It is all one mass — quilt, sheet, and all — and you awake to find yourself strangling in a horse-collar and your bare legs working like the paddles of a windmill in the midnight air of beauti- ful Bohemia. The Carlsbad Treatment does not, like the quack medicine, profess to cure everybody of every mal- ady, from toothache to trichina. It emphasizes particularly disorders of the intestines, the stomach, the liver, and the kidneys, though Bright's disease it does not undertake, and is very reticent in the presence of inherited gout or melancholy heredity. From the mind diseased it turns hopelessly away, but grapples courageously with a disordered imag- ination. Carlsbad does not promise to restore a leg by a bath in the Sprudel, however patriotic may have been the reason for its loss, or to furnish a new lung 40 SARATOGA CHIPS. by a three- weeks' diet of zwieback, or to extinguish the flame on a tippler's nose by a mud bath or a band of music. Carlsbad makes a distinction between alleviation and cure, between the cranks or the chronics, and those who are healthily and hopefully out of re- pair. The goddess of Carlsbad is Hygeia, not her sister, that other daughter of ^Esculapius, Panacea. Carls- bad is shy of drugs, and seems to administer them as alcohol and hallucinations are administered, ac- cording to the hold they have on the stomach or the cerebellum, of their victim. Your German doc- tor of medicine hates medicine. Druggists have no drugs. An apothecary-shop in America is a curiosity-shop to a German chemist. There seems to be no pathies at Carlsbad — alio, electro, hydro, or homeo — and no discussion of them. Nothing is ascribed to sorcery or incantation, magic or miracle, although the grateful Cur-guest may attribute his recovery to whatever his educa- tion may necessitate or his imagination may invent. The privileges and prejudices guaranteed to the in- dividual vine and fig-tree are taken for granted. There is no toleration. There is silence. And so while, I suppose, a lancet could be found, if one were needed, and perhaps bleeding would not be denied to the over-blooded, and possibly the knife is tried, if the man's head must come off to save his life, for the average morbid vertebrate, as THE CARLSBAD TREATMENT. 41 he comes and goes at Carlsbad, the Treatment is hot minerals, open air, wholesome food, mastication, regular exercise, and the continual feast of a con- tented mind. Sensible Carlsbad ! STRAY WAFERS. You never fail to wonder and exclaim over this hot-headed freak of nature as you sip your boiling Sprudel and keep step with the Greek priest and the Arab sheik in the hygienic promenade. How can yon doubt that you are drinking from the crater of a volcano, while you hear the roar below and look upon the hot and fitful ebullitions, no two of which are equal in height ? Where is there a volcano of lava more whimsical or capri- cious ? It has several times ceased its eruptions, and the possibility of its doing so again must keep the au- thorities and the lessee of the waters in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension, while the Cur-guest must lie awake on his wretched Dutch bed, expect- ing every moment in this world to be his next in another. In 1620 it disappeared altogether, and again in 1770, and reappeared in a new spot, as sulky as a political leader who abandons his principles as soon as they cease to be rewarded by emoluments. Nor is it deficient in those serious consequences that constitute the respectability of a riot or an earthquake to a newspaper reporter. In 1799 it 44 SARATOGA CHIPS. celebrated Washington's birthday by an eruption that resulted in a very respectable amount of dam- age, for it actually brought the Mineral- Water Treatment to an end. During the earthquake at Lisbon, in 1755, it ceased to flow. What facts are these for corroborating the fact that the central fires of the shooting star upon which we ride have considerable to do with, not only the heating, but the eruption and distribution, of the mineral nectar to which we are indebted for our improved digestion and repaired temper. When the earthquake shook Icernia, in 1805, all the Carlsbad Springs ceased to flow, and for several hours on the 26th of July not a drop could the Cur-guest get. In 1809 the Sprudel had another blow-out that exceeded anything it had attempted before, and was quite equal to any of the eruptions of Thomas Carlyle, which, by the way, would be a very appropriate name for an extinct volcano or for one in a constant state of eruption. At that manifestation the basin was blown up and blown to pieces, the Schlossbrunn vanished, and the spring came to the surface, a few feet away, that is now known as the Hygeia, which shot up sud- denly and as high as the tops of the houses. It is pleasant to be thus reminded that we are flying through space on a planet on fire at its core — an incidental circumstance that may explain and excuse the " nervous prostration " of the only animal that knows enough of his environment to be nervous about it. STRAY WAFERS. 47 As the earthquake is now one of our institu- tions, it is important to note the part played in this sensational disturbance by one of the most preva- lent and potent ingredients in mineral waters — car- bonic-acid gas. It may be called, indeed, the pri- mordial constituent. The rocks are rent, the surface is lifted, and cities are lifted with it, to allow the carbonic-acid gas to escape from its imprisonment. The escape of the gas creates the spring. The erup- 1ions of Vesuvius contain a large per cent of car- bonic-acid gas, which sometimes exhales from the ground in the vicinity of the mountain, when it is not in the act of dynamiting those who least de- serve such punishment. Buzhan Bhota, in Thibet, is rendered impassable by the discharge of the car- bonic-acid gas, which also fatally poisons the atmos- phere of the valley of the upas-tree in Java. The Sprudel is the spring nearest to the cauldron of hot carbonic-acid gas that rages under Carlsbad and sputters in its streets. Round about the caul- dron go the variegated birds of passage from every clime, their chatter mixing with the rumble from the reservoir below. Every man of lis is a natural convulsion on his own account. We might be shamed into suppressing our anger if we could re- alize that we are simply bilious volcanoes in a state of reprehensible eruption. Castles near by are constructed of the beautiful Sprudel stone, which is not simply the rock im- pregnated and colored by the Sprudel water, but 43 SARATOGA CHIPS. seems to be the water itself turned into rock. It is not an incrustation ; it is a petrifaction. It miidit be called Glaubersaltstone. Over one million pounds of Glauber salts are manufactured annually from the water of the Sprudel. A very pleasant day it will be that you devote to a drive to the ruins of Engelliaua Castle and the castle of Elbogen. You will jog along through a picturesque region, and hear the echo of the driver's whip among some rugged rocks and pretty hills. The Tcpel Valley and the valley of the Eger arc exceedingly attractive. There is a group of tall rocks overhanging the Eger called Hans Ileiling Fels. The legend is that Hans Ileiling was jilted, and his sweetheart married another. Hans ap- peared at the marriage supper with the devil, who turned the bridal party into stone, since which time they have lived in a state of perfect compatibility. Engelhaus is crumbling on the top of a precipi- tous rock four hundred and sixty-eight feet high, and is traced to the twelfth century, and then be- comes lost, as Macaulay would say, " in the twilight of history. 1 ' The same may be said of Elbogen Castle, which is kept in repair for the purposes of a prison. This fact was impressed upon the tablet of my memory by the keeper, who led us down a winding and tor- tuous stone stairway to a dark cell, where he un- STRAY WAFERS. 49 bolted an iron door, and threw the light of his bull's eye upon a man pacing to and fro in the darkness. Tf the murderer knew the way up the stairway, I am sure he could have secured his liberty, for all there was of physical strength in our party of two, and the keeper was not armed. I felt as pale as my comrade looked, and never was gladder to see the light of day than when we reached the jail-yard. We were shown a beaker full of silver farthings. This signifies that in 1352 Charles IV. freed the town of Elbogen of taxes, and commanded that this beaker of silver farthings be handed to liim or any other Emperor of Austria that should visit the place. But far more interesting than the crowned heads who visited here, and gave away what did not be- long to them, was the meteoric stone that arrived here from some other planet, or it was the nebula of another planet which lost its balance in the course of its evolution, and spent a hundred million of years in tumbling through space. It weighed one hundred and ten pounds, but it contained no in- scriptions or hieroglyphics to indicate where it came from, or how long it was on its way, or the theory upon which it started, continued, and stop- ped. We are strangers in a strange state of things. Man is a thirsty animal. His thirst conies early and lasts long. It is his first sensation and his last. " The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst. " The dying 50 SARATOGA CHIPS. are thirsty. One of them said, " Perhaps it is the thirst of death, ' ' and it was. We die of fever call- ing for water. Fever it is, a " feverish thirst " it is called. Man is too thirsty to be in good health. It comes of his environment. He is the only ani- mal who is obliged to earn his food and clothing by the sweat of his brow. The other vertebrata are born clothed and in their right mind, and find their food by seeking it. If ever they should become civilized they will appreciate their present advan- tages. Then the more we sweat the more we thirst and the deeper the fever strikes in. It is something of dismal significance, this thirst. No wonder it is made so much of as a religious metaphor. No severer punishment could be devised for Tan- talus than to be endowed with an insatiable thirst, and then compelled to stand in water which should recede from his lips whenever he attempted to drink it. What shall quench this consuming thirst of the human creature I What shall he drink ? This is the question that drives him hither and thither, and from one fountain to another, from one extreme to another. It is the despair of legislatioiii Man has more drinks than all the other animals put to- gether, from the sponge to the rhinoceros. They are content with mineral water, if they can get it ; with plain water, if they can find no other. But man's beverages have evolved from the translucent STRAY WAFERS. 51 and refreshing fluid of the spring that bubbled out when Moses smote the rock to the eighty-seven decoctions of ' k the American bar," that steal away the brains or, like the cup of Circe, change men to swine. Here is where mineral water comes in as, to use the cry of the Eastern water-carrier, li the gift of God." It is man's best drink. It never contains malarial germs or typhoid poison. It has the quenching power of the pnmp without its decayed toads, and the twang of the evil fluids without their demoniacal effects. It acts as a corrective of the hanker after intoxi- cating beverages, and allays the fiery disease that burns up brawn and brain. That which Semiramis came upon in Ethiopia had so beneficent an effect that those who drank of it were constrained to con- fess their sins. If the waters of Carlsbad and Sar- atoga should have that result, what confessionals these Spas would become ! The children of Israel have builded themselves a very large and impressive synagogue at Carlsbad. I sat down among them during their Sabbath-morn- ing worship on Saturday. I recalled the Philadel- phia Quakers of my youth, and was not so offended by their hats as other Christians seem to be. Their form of worship is older than ours. Nevertheless, we are in bondage to the new idea that reverence takes off its hat to the Deity, as politeness does to a 52 SARATOGA CHIPS. woman. I was quite pleased with the chanting of the rabbi. Ho reminded me of Pope Pins IX., whom I heard intone the service in St. Peter's dur- ing the sitting of the (Ecumenical Council. There is something in this rhymic melody that moves and soothes, whether you hear it in the Jewish syna- gogue, the Catholic cathedral, or the negro meet- ing-house. One cannot listen to these cadences in the syna- gogue without recalling the sad history and beauti- ful constancy of these scattered sheep of the Lord's fold. *I can think of them only as sitting and weep- ing by the rivers of Babylon, with their harps hang- ing on the willows, and answering their taunting captors with the pathetic words, " How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land ?" The Polish Jew, who is one of the first to attract your attention in the crowd at the Sprudel, reminds you of the fact that philanthropy is easy, if you never see the object of it. He is lean-fleshed and ill-favored. He is black from cap to boot, with the exception of his face, and that is darker than that of many a Congo. His eye is black, his hair is black, his beard is black and long, and his coat is black and longer. He wears corkscrew curls and top-boots. However little attention he may seem to give to his costume or his perfume, he is a dude now in comparison with what he was when he first came to try the STRAY AVAFERS. 53 Sprudel for his coated tongue. He was as deficient in trousers as lie was abundant in filth, and emitted an odor of far-reaching and acute purport, until an ordinance was passed requiring him to put on his breeches, and take off his dirt at the town limits, and submit to a bath in eau de cologne. The Polish Jewess shaves her head when she marries, and substitutes a hideous black wig of an- other woman's hair for the beautiful black mane that she inherited from her ancestors who lived in the time of the great King Nebuchadnezzar. But your prejudice gives way to pity when you recall the history of the two peoples represented by these singular Cur-guests, the children of Poland and the children of Israel, both of whom have been despoiled and trampled out by all the Czars of all the Russias. Is it any wonder that the Polish Jews at Carlsbad keep carefully to themselves, never look up, or to the right or left, and have a hunted and a hated air? Is it any wonder that the Russian crown is insane with dread of the retribution that has pursued it for five centuries ? ''In thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents." Carlsbad, while the resort of the highest in rank, is the most democratic of watering-places. There is absolute liberty in costume. It is no place for display — for diamonds, and bare shoulders, and sil- ver-mounted harness. Princesses and duchesses ride 54 SARATOGA CHIPS. over the mountains in the donkey-cart. Noblemen and statesmen haggle with the hackman over the fare to Giesshubl. It is amusing to see Carlsbad pluck the plumage from the airy genus United-Statesianus, with his eye-glasses of window-glass, his wast horizon of mustache, his overcoat dangling about his heels, and a coachman's cape about his shoulders, his silk hat on the back of his head to reveal his bang, and his vast assortment of sticks and alpen-stocks, and umbrellas and hat-boxes, and his piles on piles of luggage. Carlsbad, now so staid and moderate, was once, however, famous for the magnificence and hilarity of its entertainments. Kings and emperors came with troops and ban- ners, and gave elaborate festivities to the whole people, who were summoned at the top of the Deer Spring with trumpets and kettledrums, and enter- tained with fiddles, pipes, and ' horns. A prince would dress in the livery of his groom, and dance with the peasant girl. Where our rank is fixed we may do as we please with the rank below us. Augustus I., King of Poland, accompanied by his Queen, the beautiful Aurora, came to Carlsbad to be cured in 1691, and gave a great ball, and had the hot water of the Sprudel conveyed in pipes to the ball-room, and STRAY WAFERS. 55 drenched the dancers ! Never after were they troubled with gout in the light fantastic toe. There were fetes innumerable, concerts, banquets, balls, balloon ascensions, chess tournaments, in which ^children in fancy costume were chessmen. It required sixty-six hundred horses to convey the Emperor Charles and his retinue to Carlsbad in 1732. But those days are over, and the days of moder- ation in all things have come. Carlsbad has taken the festive garland from the brow of Bacchus and laid it upon the head of llygeia, who now feeds her snake on Mr. Glauber's salts, and sees that her wor- shippers say their prayers early in the morning and early in the evening. When you are weary, and lonely, and a trifle home- sick, as you sit, and sip, and watch the worshippers of Hygeia at the Sprudel, a feeling of sadness will creep into your sensibilities as the strains of music creep into your ears. Sit, Jessica ! Look how the floor of this colonnade is covered with the heroic Spartans in a hopeless fight ! " Fight thou there- fore bravely, and bid the other Greeks be brave." Here is the old dissipate who supposes he can get out of the hot water he has got into by putting the hot water into him. Here is the young blood whose blood is poisoned by nicotine or alcohol, who im- agines that he can restore what he has lost during the dissipation of ten years by sipping at the 56 SARATOGA CHIPS. Sprudel fortliree weeks. Here is mamma's darling who expects to recover the vitality she has danced away, by a fortnight's diet of eggs and zwieback. Inherited maladies are to take flight at the first draught of chloride of sodium, and the lame man is to leap as a hart by bathing his cork leg in peat. Three weeks is expected to restore its natural hue to a nose that has required the half of life to illuminate. Here is an old countess who goes through all weathers in search of the elixir which is to restore her to the vigor that she probably lost by defying the laws which she is now trying to obey. She is carried to her bath, wrapped in rubber blankets, and often has a shower bath from the teasing hea- vens before she reaches the bath, which is to be of the earth earthy. Here is the miserable Cur-guest who expects to find the waters of Lethe in the glass that hangs about his neck. They will drown the memories of his sorrowful past ; and who would deny him the fulfilment of his wish ? Many a countenance is distressing enough, and when that face multiplies itself hundreds and hun- dreds of times, you will feel the force of the cour- ageous and pathetic struggle for existence into which we are all drafted. You will realize as you look upon the pallid cheek of youth, the furrowed brow of age, the child handi- capped with a club-foot, and the melancholy eye of GTRAY WAFERS. 57 the broken in health, who are also broken-hearted, that the hope is a forlorn one, and for that reason alone as awfully sad as it is inexpressibly sublime. Every remedy is a crutch for a wounded hero. Ah me ! if the immortals see this fight of the heroic genus homo, they must many a time fill the heavens with a clamor of admiration. The trees of the fields clap their hands and the sweet heavens weep at the sight. Wonderful, marvellous strug- gle and wrestle of man with his environment and interiorment ! Has the universe of worlds and beings any other spectacle like this \ Gambling is forbidden at Carlsbad for two rea- sons and no third : first, because it interferes with the Treatment, and, second, because it is injurious to business, where the business is to provide tor the pleasure, comfort, or health of a vast number of visitors. The Cur-guest must not be excited and public order must not be endangered. Order is the first law of — property ! No moral considerations seem to be entertained. It is a question of expedi- ency and not of ethics. It is the same at all the great resorts of Germany. There is no more conclusive evidence of this than the fact that those who have investments in the gambling-places are allowed abundance of " notice to quit." Hights are acknowledged and property protected. The Teuton, whether Catholic or Lutheran, is 58 SARATOGA CHIPS. not a Puritan or a Quaker. Puritanism is unintel- ligible to a German. He is seeking visitors and customers. He is working his mineral springs, and black forests, and dead towns, and crumbling castles for all they are worth to the tourist and Cur-guest in marks and guldens. Gambling is detrimental to this object. It is inexpedient. Policy conquers what morality might not have the courage to assail. Nor would morality have an army adequate for the assault. The gambler votes down gambling, the vicious insist that vice shall be conceajed, if they have any real estate to be de- preciatecl by it. There is no Socialistic experiment about Carls- bad, nothing of the fanaticism of trying to escape from the world by the fugitives who compose it, and who only aggravate the objections to it by re- stricting it to themselves. It is easier to get rid of the world by being a part of it than by constitut- ing the whole of it. Carlsbad is not a Brook-Farm or a Shaker village. It has no peculiar theories about money or matrimony. It is not a peninsula of society, but the mainland. Carlsbad has no appearance of a hospital. It does not offend the eye, or nose, or any other sense, or common sense with the odor of drugs or the concentration of deformities and maladies. This is precluded by the European aversion for bringing STRAY WAFERS. 59 together people whom God has put asunder. No ; Carlsbad is not one vast hospital or a cluster of small hospitals, where the most formidable obstacle to recovery is the sight of those whose recovery is impossible. Their springs, like ours, are all in a valley. The valley of Jehoshaphat would have been found to be full of them, if Jehoshaphat had been a Sara- toga Yankee. All visitors used to be received with a flourish of trumpets. But that was done away with, because visitors arrived when other visitors were trying to sleep. It is a pleasant ride to the Giesshubler Spring when it does not rain pitchforks and hail hailstones, which it did when Joseph and I made the charming trip. I put some of the crystals, fresh from the clouds, into my glass of milk, fresh from the goat. That was the only time I ever had ice in my milk or water on the Continent of Europe since I first began to travel over it twenty years ago. Giesshubl attracts about eighteen thousand vis- itors annually, and it was bottling four millions of bottles annually while we were there. I was mortified to find them addressing the cases for the commercial capital of the United States of America with a small y — New york. 60 SARATOGA CHIPS. Carlsbad has been benefited by those whom it has benefited. Monuments, rocks, and trees are written over with gratitude for health restored and mind composed. Whether clumsy poetry or Tin- grammatical prose, it is very touching and gratifying. As long ago as 1510 Dr. Von Bohnslau wrote a Latin ode to the wonderful cure, and in later times Goethe and Schiller, and many a lesser poet has written thankful pseans to the efficacy of the Treat- ment. Monarchs, and nobles, and wealthy merchants have contributed to the charities of the town or aided in increasing its attractions and conveniences. In a pretty nook amid the hills you come upon an ob- elisk called after Lord Finlater. He was a Scotch nobleman, who gave liberally to beautify the en- virons of the town and fill the treasury of its chari- ties. His gifts came of gratitude for the benefit he had derived from the waters, and this obelisk of the town's gratitude to him. One of the inscriptions left by a grateful Cur- guest, when few Americans had shinplasters enough left over from their fight for independence to pay the fare to Carlsbad, is : A. F. 1798. divin Sprudel ! fontaine sacree / Riche present du Giel ! I sat down to rest upon the " Princesses' Seat," where three royal sisters of Austria once sat down .1 the goddess hygeia. — "She drives away the evils of languor and weakness— without her beauty cannot exist." STRAY WAFERS. 63 to rest, and I meditated upon the uneasy heads in the " Empresses' Seat," where the wife of Francis I. doubtless fell into the same line of reflection in L810. Near by i; the Friend's Seat," where a Russian count and a Russian admiral used to sit and chat, I saw an inscription in French to the goddess Ilygeia : " She drives away the evils of languor and weakness — without her beauty cannot exist.' 1 In the glorious days of Greece and Rome whoever wished to win public approbation and benefit the town erected thermae, or edifices for warm baths. They were commodious, imposing, and costly. There were spaces and apartments for gymnastics, games, and intellectual entertainments, free library, and conversation. They were the resort of rulers, poets, statesmen, and orators. Agrippa, Titus, Caracalla, and Diocletian presented thermae to the people. What an opportunity Saratoga Springs oilers to benevolent wealth and public enterprise for such a project ! They need not attempt a rivalry with the baths of Caracalla in costliness and magnificence, but they might bless the great spa and through it an innumerable number of people with a noble and ample Temple of Health, Art, Science, Amuse- ment, and Instruction. The Saratoga Athenaeum, with its Greek name and classic associations, affords an admirable basis for such a benefaction. HI SARATOGA CHIPS. When the Children of Light como into their in- lieritance no Saratogian will think of closing the season without doing something to benefit or beautify the town In which it has pleased God to place his investments in hostelry and real estate. Your Dutch driver is a cracker of whips, [ie cracks his whip at bis liorse to start liim or stop him ; he cracks his whip to warn the pedestrian out of the way ; ho cracks his whip to announce his ar- rival at the bote! <\<»>\- ; he cracks his whip to chaff the po'dv nurse at the baby carriage ; ho cracks his whip to keep lime to his <>wu musings. Ele never speaks to bis horse or bis fare, the crack of bis whip is the only language that he seems to speak. The oddity to match this in the Saratoga driver is his "wo-back." He is the only driver in the world who tells his horse lo |»;ie,l< when he wishes him simply to stop. As Saratoga has its ( Jitizens' ( Jorps and < inn ( !iub, so Carlsbad lias its shooting corps Royal Shooting Corps. Where royalty reigns everything is lt royal." I suggested to an bumble tradesman in London whether it would not be of advantage to him to float the banner over bis wares of " l Peanut Vender to Her Majesty the Queen 1" He was as much offended as Her Majesty might have been by the insinuation. The Royal Shooting Corps bf Carlsbad is not STRAY WAFERS. 65 simply a jolly company in holiday regalia. They not only fire at a mark, but compel the disorderly to toe the mark. They are a tony police or town guard, and are very satisfactory to those who like to have a touch of the picturesque in the plumage of the male as well as the female of our species. They keep step in grain and gold to the delightful refrains that never fail to come from the German hands, however unpretentious or ill-paid. Visitors, noble, ignoble, and American, are al- lowed to participate in these shooting matches, and sometimes the country bumpkin hits the mark, while the scion of a lordly strain must be content with hitting only the target. Of those who have an aim in life many hit the target, few hit the mark, while a greater number than that of either of these must, owing to some- thing left out of their composition, live and die an aimless life. On my second morning at the Sprudel I fell in with a venerable polyglot, who startled me with the notion that soon took possession of me, that this was Paracelsus, who was still travelling over tin's country in search of the elixir that should bless the jaded human anthropoid with a new digestive apparatus and a new infusion of venous and arterial blood. lie was the beau-ideal of a philosopher, a doctor, and a crank. He was thin, and his eye, deep- 66 SARATOGA CHIPS. sunken in his head, shot coruscations out from under a jutting pair of bushy eyebrows. His countenance was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. He had the bearing of a recluse and the gait of a man who had used the same legs for at least seventy-five years. He spoke several lan- guages, and none better than that of Shakespeare and myself. He was easily beguiled into conversa- tion, and was very blithe and chatty when he found I was an American, pure and simple, and without admixture. Was I sure I had no German or other foreign strain in my veins ? " Yes," I replied, " unless, of course, you force me back a couple of centuries." ' ; Ah ! that is fair enough," he said ; "a couple of centuries brings you back to where we now stand. We were all European brigands once, you know, flying at each other's throats upon the slightest prov- ocation." " Very much as we do now ?" " True, very much as we do now, only now we do our work of destroying one another with a more refined sense of malignant satisfaction. We open the battle with prayer, read out of the Gospel of peace and good- will, and close with the benediction. In fact," continued Paracelsus, warming as he con- tinued, " the fact now so generally received, that man is a part of nature, is getting itself illustrated anew with every revolution of the earth around the sun. STRAY WAFERS. 67 He is in involuntary sympathy with the forces that shake the planet and howl over its surface, carry- ing all before them with cyclones of wind or cata- racts of water. These multitudes of people who gather here are a painful illustration of the fact. The human race is growing more and more nervous and volcanic, and convulsions and eruptions of hu- manity are sure to multiply in consequence. You .see by what is going on in your country that the form of government or the structure of society has little to do with it. Republicanism is but a cobweb thrown over the crater. The very light that civil- ization is pouring upon the human mind only aggra- vates its restlessness by increasing its sensitiveness to its obstacles. Educate the ignoramus, and the knowledge he obtains will be dynamite to both him and his educator. His new light reveals his own strength and the weakness of his adversary, his ad- versary being any one who represents his oppressors of the past. His oppressors of the past are the crowned villains who loaded their guns with the hearts of his ancestors, and the nobles and gentry who accumulated lands and palaces by leaving his ancestors exposed to the elements and the wild beasts." I charged Paracelsus with being a Republican, and slightly Red at that. " No, no," he said; "not a Republican, not a Monarchist, nothing but a Pessimist, a victim myself of the new flood of light that has come over the 68 SARATOGA CHIPS. world. I, like the wretched revolutionists I am talking about, know too much. Too much knowl- edge is a dangerous thing. It makes the slave fight for freedom and the free laborer fight for more freedom. It is unfair. It does not fall equally upon the just and the unjust, the simple and the cunning. It plays into the hands of unjust wisdom and cripples the energies of honest incapacity." At this point the arrival of the carriage that I had ordered for a drive with some friends brought our conversation to an end, and we parted, Paracel- sus and I, with a hearty shake of the hands, and expressing the hope that we should at some future time resume the thread of our discussion. After my zwieback and a mud bath one Sunday morning I strolled into the Church of St. Mag- dalen. It has looked down from its niche on the hill- side upon many of the convulsions that have shaken Bohemia and rent Europe. It has been standing here since 1419, at least. It is an odd bit of architecture, and contains colossal evangelists in stone. Where is there a church of this ancient creed that does not move the sensibilities ? I have been in all the great cathedrals and at many of the unpretending shrines, where the candles burned and the poor knelt. Their very silence is impres- sive, and when the music comes it is always en- trancing, as it was at St. Magdalen, that overlooks the hurrying Tepel and the boiling Sprudel. The STRAY WAFERS. 69 services were performed by the deacons of the Red Cross, who were organized in the time of the cru- sades for the care of the sick and wounded. There was a full hand, a wonderful soprano, a powerful baritone, and an organ of enormous power. The effect was alternately rousing and Bubduing. They Bang the Fidestes Adeles, thai ravishing bit of ap- pealing pathos, in the minor key, which lingers for- ever in the memory after it is once heard. It is mortifying to the gastronomic vanity of the rich invalid to find himself obliged to resort to the diet of the poor, in order to share their health. This shows bow the whirligig of time brings round its revenges. Luxury is dyspeptic. Poverty di- gests its food, and sleeps till morning. The work- ing people of Europe, but for whom the nobles of Europe would starve, live on the gastronomical round prescribed for the victims of inordinate wealth. Cobden attributed French prosperity to the soup of the French peasant. We may as well call Austria Germany, for the people are the same in customs and vernacular, and would be the same in political fraternity but for their rulers and owners, who order them to shoulder the hod or the musket, in accordance with the in- trigues and whims of their reigning families. Well, the reigning family of the United States of 70 SARATOGA CHIPS. America, fifty million strong, has its whims and in trigues, too, and with disastrous consequences. In one peculiarity the Teuton is the same the world over. In Austria, as in Prussia, you see the original of the thrift that in America has made the solitary prairie blossom with towns and farms. If here, in the midst of plenty, they cultivate their fence corners, there their little children may be seen gleaning' after the grain wagon in the held. They pick up every stalk and spear. Nothing goes to waste. Even the young idea of the nobility is taught to shoot. The royal children learn a trade. " The Sprudel Book" was abolished in 1791. In that all visitors put their names, and opposite to them their voluntary contributions, which they felt compelled to make for music and the water. Now you have your name and voluntary contribution put down for you. If you do not remain over eight days you may depart without further taxation than that visited upon you by your landlady and her regiment of cormorants, who exact a florin for every bow and smile. If your stay is nine days you will be waited on for cur-tax and music-tax. The amount depends upon your "size" in the estimation of the tax-estimator. Here is where keeping up appearances by those who cannot afford to does not pay. In New York it does, perhaps in Saratoga it does, but at Carlsbad it does not. You are classified for the tax by the number of your STRAY WAFERS. ?'l servants and apartments. If they are suspiciously superfluous you will be classed with American financiers, who have come by way of Canada, and knighted brewers from the British Isles, and taxed about five dollars. If you are _one of the bonanza gods, denying himself the coupons which his heirs will share with their lawyer, you will be let off with about two dollars and a half , by taking a back room on the fourth floor. Your music will cost you from one to two dollars, according to your appreciation of Wagner and Beethoven, determined by your changes of raiment and the number of your wife's diamonds. You may call a roll of great names from the pages of the Sprndel Book. You may read the name of the first and only Iron Duke of Welling- ton while the present possessor of the title is passing under the window. You may study here the auto- graphs of kings, written by their grooms of the bed- chamber, and the veritable chirography of king- makers and music teachers, of Metternich, Beetho- ven and Bismarck, Schopenhauer and Bach, Auer- bach and Paganini, Tourgenieff and Eugenia, Peter the Great and Goethe the Great. Every boarding-house that lodged the Czar or the poet is carefully and conspicuously inscribed with his name and the date on which he was obliged to try the other houses 1 beds. Goethe the Great took his last drink of the Sprndel for his sins in 1823. lie was seventy-four, 72 SARATOGA CHIPS. and the lass that he fell in love with on this occa- sion was only seventeen. She was one of the few of his flames who jilted him, but compromised on a wreath of flowers for his bust when it was unveiled in Carlsbad in 1883. Marshal Blucher came after the battle of Water- loo. He said " he had been the enemy of water all his life, and now the devil had sent him where he could get nothing else." All the crowned heads have been here and heads that have lost their crowns, and people who have lost 'their heads and have come here to find them, and society queens who have run down and have come here to be wound up. The room I had at the Westminster, the landlady took great pains to inform me, was Eugenia's when she was here last trying to mend her broken heart with the waters of the Sprudel. I saw her on the throne in all her stateliness and grace. When I saw her last she was preparing for the flight which I have described in " Shut Up in Paris." She was pale and sad then. She is paler and sadder now. From the Prince of Peace clown they all have their vinegar to drink. It was maintained at a meeting of the Restless Club at Carlsbad that the ill do more of the world's best work than the well ; that the ill live longer than the well, and that there are more eo- STRAY WAFERS. 73 pie in Paradise to-day who have reached there through illness, and fatal illness at that, than there are of those exasperating fiends who were forever hoasting while upon earth that they " were never sick a day in their lives, and hadn't an unsound tooth in their head." lam reminded of the old lady who said she noticed that if she lived through the month of March she lived the whole year. She came to a March at last that she could not pass. These cheerful and inviting propositions were supported by an overwhelming array of biographical facts, which were not allowed to be met with coun- ter facts or in any way disputed. The greatest humorists and comedians are accord- ingly, as a rule, confirmed hypochondriacs. Theo- dore Hook complained of constant depression ; Sain- villc brought down the house with grimaces that came of the rheumatism, which, in turn, stimulated his wit ; the twinges of the gout that made Vernet groan made his audience laugh ; Basuege blew out the brains that kept the crowded theatre in a roar ; the rollicking rhyme of " John Gilpin" was written in one of poor Cowper's w r orst fits of the blues ; Douglas Jerrold coined his funniest drolleries in a dark room, while his eyes throbbed with agony ; Moliere's comedies were written under a dense cloud of despondency ; the witty Samuel Foote, and Monrose, and Potier, and Tousez all died in de- spair ; "Rousseau's fascinating sentimentalisms were the exhalations of his ^loom : Robert Hall's flights 74 SARATOGA CHIPS. of eloquence were arrows shot from the pain in his spine ; Heine's exquisite irony, and Swift's sting- ing satire, and Carlyle's javelins of invective, and De Quincey's beautiful dreams, and George Eliot's marvellous analysis, and Pope's incomparable rhyme, and Scott's " Bride of Lammermoor," and Dr. Johnson's axioms, and Mrs. Browning's poetry, and Miss Bronte's stories, and Green's history, and Clifford's mathematics never saw the light without travail, and torture, and self-crucifixion. Eloquence and wit, rhetoric and logic, and the phraseological philosophy of the Concord School of Philosophy are all the more attractive and palatable for coining of a morbidity which quickens the action of the in- tellect and increases the power of rhetorical expres- sion. Borne complained of his recovery, and said the doctor "had cured him to health and stupid- ity. " He was well, but he was a fool. When he was ill he was witty. As walking about is a part of the Carlsbad Treat- ment — a movement cure of nature's own providing — the opportunity for carrying out this part of the Treatment is abundant. Nature and art combine to make the place attractive to the legs and eyes of the invalid vertebrata. The environs are enrapturing. You oh-oh at every step, for at every step of the easy incline a new and larger view bursts upon you. The dark green of the evergreen forests ; the sunlight burst- STRAY WAFERS. 75 ing out from under the surly rain-cloud ; the wind- ing valleys to right and left, with here and there a glimpse of glittering water ; queer little Carlsbad nestling far below ; the snatches of music "floating up from cafe or park ; the approaching and receding mountain-chains ; the endless wilderness of tall and graceful pine, interspersed with linden, chestnut, birch, and mountain ash ; the carpet of leaf and moss, of bluebells and buttercups, under your feet ; the marvellous sky effects and cloud effects ; the farms and their crops of barley, oats, and vege- tables ; "the orchard, the meadow, and the deep- tangled wildwood, and all the loved scenes" which were known to the infancy of our race — why, one could ramble about Carlsbad daily for the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, and then begin all over again, and find the first walk as new and charming as when we took it for the first time. One of these strolls is over the broad and shady gravel walk by the hill-side and the river-side. It is called "the four-o'clock promenade." It is lined with a double row of mammoth lindens, and overhung with majestic hills, now tipped with sun- light and now sombre with the shadow of the pass- ing clouds. The long line of booths under the trees are covered with all manner of pretty things for sale, contrived by the cunning fingers of the indus- trious Bohemians. The music will draw you to the cafe, where you never fail to be pleased with the 76 SARATOGA CHIPS. sobriety and contentment of the German at his pleasures. Here you may sit at all hours, from the small hours of the morning to the end of the long twilight, and watch the hurrying stream of the river or the leisurely current of human life. In Carlsbad you do not need to walk yourself weary before you reach the spot where your walk begins. You have only to get out of bed. You do not need to go out at the door. You may step out of tne window upon the green slope, and begin the ascent in the bracing Bohemian morning. The highest hill that overlooks Carlsbad is Ewige Leben, eternal life. It is two thousand feet above the sea. I rambled all over it again and again, and every time was better pleased than at any time before. It is an exhilarating and fascinating stroll. The law is that every tree cut down shall be sup- planted by another, and that excellent statute is rigidly enforced, as you can see in your rambles through the forests that cover these glorious hills. The wood is very valuable, and while they are saw- ing the old log a new one is growing in its place. The tree is His, and He made it, and it ought to be treated with a reverence commensurate with its use and beauty. Time was in the Pyrenees when injury to trees STRAY WAFERS. 77 was murder in the first degree, and there was the same punishment for the man who cut down a tree without authority as for the man who cat down his fellow-man. The Continental manners are military. Attitudes and hat-itudes come of the land being a camp, society an aristocracy, government a monarchy, and the throne the seat of social as well as martial power. Manners are handed down from the royal family, and handed round to every family. The Germans — in fact, all the Continentals, lift the hat to man as well as woman. Nor is there much discrimination in hat-lifting. Francis Josef could hardly he greeted with a barer head than that which greeted me an hour after I had been introduced to it. The porter rises, uncovers, and drops his eye upon your purse ; the chambermaid courtesies low at the shrine of American gratuities. I think we manage the hat with a more discrim- inating courtesy. We take it off to gray hairs, the President of the United States, and the ladies. Gentlemen touch it to one another, while nothing can be more touching to a gentleman than the nod of the plumes of a lady's bonnet. An Englishman wears his hat in bed. There is something quite neighborly and gratify- ing in the custom of the Continental in recognizing your existence as he leaves the car or the table at 78 SARATOGA CHIPS. the restaurant. He may not have spoken to you throughout the whole day's journey, but when he rises to leave the compartment he lifts his hat, and says adieu. That is to say, Good -by, old fellow. You and I are travelling on the same balloon in space, and will presently join one another in col- lapsing into the balloon. Bon voyage and a peace- ful conclusion to it ! Yes, manners are taffy, and taffy tells. The salesman's suavity (until he finds you do not intend to buy), the waiter's series of infinitesimal atten- tions, the smiling deference of the hotel clerk, your little French teacher's commendation of your accent — manners are taffy, and taffy tells. Let us not underestimate manners. It is said sneer- ingly that they are superficial. So are all our social relations, fortunately for our peace of mind and the peace of society, and nothing is unimportant that keeps those relations in good repair. But " the polite are not sincere. ' ' Yes they are. Politeness is itself a form of sincerity. You may be as sincere with superficial etiquette as profound convictions, and are likely to be a far more agreeable neighbor with the former than the latter. The reason why Skimpole succeeds where honest Mr. Porcupine fails is because people prefer good-natured imposi- tion to the highest integrity, if it is clothed in quills. STRAY WAFERS. 79 Manners oil the social machinery. The brusque break against them. We must yield or be thrown. Custom will not. Teach your children the few plain and simple courtesies of society. You may be unable to prevent their being porcupines, as that may be a matter of heredity, hut you may teach them how to keep down their quills, even if they do run in the family. The male Bohemians are as cruel to their women as they are polite to one another. They uncover, and bow, and bend low under their heavy sense of urbane consideration, while their women bend lower under their burden of wood or coal. In common with the American Indian and the African Zulu, the men smoke while the women work. Women sow and reap, women plough and drag the plough. The milk-cart and slop-wagon are drawn by women and dogs, and the driver, Hans Boheme, is kinder to his canine on the off side than to his deceased wife's sister on the near side. He is fond of birds, cats, and pups, and even boy babies, but is harsh to the female beast of burden of his own species, and wishes he were a Hindoo, that he might throw his female young into the Tepel. Etiquette is no more evidence of justice than public worship is of private morals. Politeness in society is a form like genuflexion in church. I in- sist that it is indispensable, but so far from proving 80 SARATOGA CHIPS. character, it may be intended to conceal the want of character. Urbanity and cruelty are often found together, and live together amicably. Here is where Saratoga excels Carlsbad, with all its manners and its hills, and here is where the stars on our flag differ from all others on all other flags — they shine upon a nation illustrious for man's reverence for woman ! THE POET SCHILLEE AT CARLSBAD. ALL THE CURES. As the Mineral-AYater Cure lias its full share of space in this volume, we will omit it from this in- ventory, and begin with the Treatment which prob- ably antedates it — plain water, as it falls out of the clouds or springs out of the earth. The Water Cuke. — Water as a remedy, as a soother, or al layer, or alleviator, is as old as water and man. Water for wounds, water for ills, water in the shape of a wet sheet for rheumatism, or a wet cap for a hot head, or a bucketf ul for a pair of fighting dogs. But snuff is better for the dogs. Water cold, water warm, water piping hot -man, whether out of repair or in full possession of all his faculties, has no better remedial resource than water. Common water taken every quarter of an hour, a gobletful at a time, was long ago recom- mended for gout. Fire-water is never recom- mended for gout. Besides, as we have shown elsewhere, all water is more or less impregnated with minerals. At all events, it is always wet, and cool, if you prefer it so, or you may have it wet and warm, if that will suit you better. It will cleanse also, and the cleaner 82 SAKATOGA CHIPS. you keep, the pleasanter you will be as a connubial companion. Cleanliness is next to godliness, there- fore with some it is next to nothing. Common water is food and mineral water is medicine, and food, we are told by the learned faculty, is obliged to obey the laws of the human organization, while medicine compels the organiza- tion to obey the laws of the remedy. A curious understanding, I must say, but it cannot be avoided if it cannot be disproved. The Water Cure, or hydropathy, includes and mak|s much of baths — so much of them, indeed, and the whole world of Cur-guests make so much of them, that they are entitled to a chapter of their own, and will receive it in this volume. The Hot- Water Cure. — This is a glass of hot water, taken a half hour before breakfast every morning of the seven days of the week, of the fifty-two weeks of the year, for the three score years and ten. The American citizen of bilious descent, who knows a good thing when he feels it,- will find this of inestimable service, but it will be of no use to the fast eater, or the pickle eater, or the man with the tears of whiskey in his eyes. For these there is no forgiveness. One of my mineral- water authorities tells me that " the virtues of the Baden-Baden waters are reduced to those of simple hot water." Doubtless with many a disordered imagination at Carlsbad or Saratoga the water from the pump heated would ALL THE CUKES. 83 have the desired effect, if it could only be drawn from an alleged mineral spring. The Mug wort Cure. — This, so far as I am in- formed, is exclusively a Japanese remedy. It com- bines the heat cure, the water cure, and the herb cure, or juice, caloric, and vegetable matter. The leaves of the mug wort are placed upon the shoulder- blade and set on fire, and the blister thus created cures asthma. Those who are restored by the Mug- wort Cure are known as Mugwumps. The Diet Cure. — If you are a dyspeptic, as you are pretty sure to be if you are a citizen by birth of the United States, or if your liver is out of order, as it is tolerably likely to be if you have spent much of your life out of the frigid zone, I would advise you to eat, drink, and be merry in accordance with the dietary menu of the Carlsbad Treatment for five years of three hundred and sixty -live days each. (See chapter on the Carlsbad Treatment.) The Inhalation Cure. — You inhale your remedy instead of swallowing it or wallowing in it, whether it be vapor, electricity, gas, spray, mineralized air, or sea air. The famous Galen recommended the sulphurous air of Sicily. The base of Vesuvius during an eruption would be very effective. Some physicians hang branches of pine and some seaweed about the room of their consumptive patient. The inhalation Treatment may be carried on by the patient himself after he is once shown what he is to do and how he is to do it. 84 SARATOGA CHIPS. The Massage or Shampoo Cure. — This is an old device, which the Occident owes to the Orient, and both to accident, for it is altogether probable that it grew ont of the custom of squeezing the water out of the drowning fellow-creature who overdid the Water Cure while in a state of empty pockets or unrequited affection. It consists of kneading the abdomen and punching the joints, and the quacks who have abused it ought to have their heads punched for their mercenary ignorance. It is generally accompanied by baths. Massage is an Arabic word, and means to press softly, and is not to be confounded with mashage. It was fashionable with the Chinese and Indians (of India) centuries before our era of ills and pills, and is now fashionable with the decollete society of the Feejee and the Sandwich Islands. They lie down flat on their backs, and the children walk over them. As massage or shampooing owes its efficacy to animal magnetism, its efficacy must depend upon the amount of animal magnetism which the sham- pooer is able to impart. This accounts for the fail- ure of some and the success of others who practice this Treatment, whether in the pulpit or at the barber's chair. In all hydropathics much is made of the friction produced by rubbing after the bath. It is stimu- lative. But there is always danger of dulness coming on as the effect of the rubbing passes off. ALL THE CURES. 85 In that case fleas may be used. We are told that pet dogs grow dull from too much washing and combing. They miss the stimulus of fleas. The Milk Cure. — There are several kinds of milk besides that of New York City — cow's milk, goat's milk, sheep's milk, mare's milk, donkey's milk, and the milkman's milk. With the excep- tion of the milkman's milk that of the donkey con- tains the most water. Sheep's milk is the most used in the Milk Cure of Europe. It is the most nutritious. The Russian doctors use mare's milk, and consider it the richest milk known. It makes the richest butter. I saw a milkman's sign from the top of a London omnibus the other day, which ran thus, " Royal Short- Horn Dairy ;" and this was under it, " The public are invited into the cow-house to see the milk drawn from the cow for the jugs at four pence !" There seems to be as much scepticism about the purity of milk as there is concerning the existence of people like ourselves in the planet Mars. You are sure of pure milk for your Milk Cure at Saratoga, for if the cream does not rise on it the author of it is carried down to the beautiful Sara- toga Lake, and is seen no more. The tribes on the Russian and Siberian Steppes have long used mare's milk as a remedy for and preventive of consumption, and now and then the milk of human kindness is found to be a capital 86 SARATOGA CHIPS. remedy for the complaints of labor. It is seldom tried, however, but it will be when the Golden Rule becomes the rule of life. Kefyr is another milk preparation produced by fermentation, and is sometimes called effervescent milk wine. It is aimed at stomachic disorders, and is said to nourish where all other food and drink fails. Whey, or milk minus its caseine, is taken for scrofula and disorders of the kidneys. The Milk Cure is prescribed for dyspepsia, dropsy, and articular rheumatism, or rheumatism that com- pels you to articulate your opinion of it. Buttermilk is recommended for plethora abdom- inalis, and koumiss, or fermented mares' milk — the milk, not the mare, being fermented — is con- sidered good for intestinal catarrh and, in the case of a politician, for inflammation of the JE Phiribus Unuvi. Milk was a common drink in Homer's day. He probably wrote better poetry under its inspiration than some more recent poets write under the influ- ence of the juice of rye straw. The mighty bard of Greece spread his wings toward the sun with nothing to sustain his flight, except the milk of the mountain goat. He was " nursed in the milk of a better time." In sentimental Italy the milkman has a water- skin up his arm, which he surreptitiously squeezes into your cup of pure milk. ALL THE CURES. 87 There is or was once a lot of our fellow-crea- tures on the Caspian Sea called Massagetse. Their name would insinuate that they practice massage. At all events, they are devoted to the Milk Cure and the survival of the youngest, for they eat their grandmothers. The Grape Cure. — The quantity of grapes you are to consume varies from five to twenty-five pounds a day of this delicious medicine. Grapes stimulate secretion, although nut economy, because while the sugar absorbed operates beneficially upon the kidneys, it operates financially upon the physi- cian who prescribes it. The Fruit Cure. — If grapes fail there are other fruits of bush and tree, such as strawberries, cherries, currants, and peaches, which have the same effect upon the imagination, if not upon the gastric juices. The Peach and Cream Cure might be tried by the exercise of a little fortitude. It is common in Delaware and New Jersey. The Herb Cure. — The herbs of the herb doctors cure everybody of everything. The medicine man of the red Americans will tell you all about it, and several herb doctors there are of our own race of credulous Americans who will demonstrate to you that whatever be your malady their decoction of juices will restore you. The Herb Cure will cure you of descending to the swine, if you have descended from the gods. 88 SARATOGA CHIPS. The followers of Odysseus were inflicted with a mal- ady of the imagination called insania zoanthropica, which transformed them into pigs. Odysseus him- self escaped the disease by eating an herb prescribed by Dr. Hermes, called moly, and to this day the herb apothecaries have been searching in vain for moly. If they could only find a remedy for the Americans who have " eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner" — the root of all evils ! A sorrow-soothing herb was given to Helen by the Egyptian Polydamne, and she prescribed it to Telenviclms for his melancholy over the memory of Ulysses. Homer tells us that to Agamde, " each healing herb was known that springs from the great earth.' 5 The Herb Cure disputes an- tiquity with the Mineral- Water Cure. The Raw- Meat Cure. — Raw ham, raw game, raw beef, are to be found among the innumerable remedies that flesh is heir to. As the meat must be chewed to be efficacious, it would be a failure in this country. As soon as mastication sets in, it would be well enough to try the Raw-Meat Cure. When mastication comes dyspepsia goes, and half the cures will go with it. The Swedish-Movement Cure. — You are shaken up by machinery, as you deserve to be, if you will not shake yourself up early in the morning and shake your legs in a daily perambulation of ten miles. It is good for hot-headed people who have cold feet. It corrects irregular circulation, and will ALL THE CURES. 89 postpone, if not altogether prevent, paralysis. People who cannot work up will enough or sense enough to walk may be induced to get into the movement-cure machine, at the rate of two dollars an hour. The Electricity Cure. — Never fail to pay your nickel and seize the handles of the machine of the itinerant electrifier. Headache, and toothache, and aches of the joints, and even the aching heart of misplaced attachment may be appeased by the Elec- tricity Cure. The Liver-Pad Cure. — An eminent physician was asked if he thought the liver-pad does any good. " Do you think it does ?" "Yes." " Well, then it does !" The liver-pad is borrowed from the malarious Italians. They applied plasters of frankincense to the pit of the stomach to regulate the secretions of bile. It is as old in this country as turpentine for rheumatism or camphor for headache. Many a grandmother of ours has enclosed frank- incense in a bag, and hung it on her person, as a buffer against malaria. It is no remedy, however, for sewer-gas or plumbers. " Do you think.it does you any good ?" "No." "Then it don't !" The Short- Vacation Cure. — This is the ounce 90 SARATOGA CHIPS. of prevention. It is designed to make a cure un- necessary. It is a hop-up and run off, without even so much as a half hour's notice or a change of linen. When you feel your head simmering, your wits scattering, and your temper snapping your wife's head off, tell your employer that you will go mad unless you go to Saratoga. If you are your own employer, you are probably, as the Scotch say, " not altogether there," and nothing will bring you there altogether like a sudden flight to Saratoga and a slide down on a toboggan, if it is winter, or a lay off on the hotel piazzas, if it is summer, and a good swig of mineral water, whether it is winter or summer. Waiting for the regulation vacation to come round is itself wearying and worrying. The system gets by the point where recuperation is pos- sible, and never gets back again to it. The break that could be repaired by a brief rest becomes so chronic from neglect that a long vacation loses its effect. The Faith Cure. — Only believe that you will bo cured by believing that you will be cured, and you certainly will be cured of whatever can be cured by believing that it has been cured. The Mind Cure. — Make up your mind that you will be cured by making up your mind that you will be cured, and you certainly will be cured of whatever you can be cured of by making up your mind that you have been cured of it. Stop your mind from thinking of your body. ALL THE CURES. 91 Take your tongue by the throat and strangle it every time it says one word about your ills, aches, pains, or misfortunes. That's the Mind Cure. Stop thinking while you are eating. If you think during your meal of your business or profes- sion, of your pending bargain or the article you are writing, you will eat as rapidly as you think, and your food will go down in lumps, and nervous dyspepsia will certainly ensue. The minstrel's jokes or Gilbert's comedies will help you chew your chops and relish your macaroni. The Compulsory-Rest ('ire. — This is gym mis- tical. It is of the nature of a silence cure by gag- ging, a stationary cure by a strait-jacket, a rest cure, in short, by an application of compulsion, which aggravates the restless disposition. Nothing makes a man want to get up like holding him down. The cheapest and quickest way to secure the bene- fits of the Compulsory-Rest Cure is to commit some crime that will insure you a cell in the penitentiary. The Rest Cure that is genuine, voluntary, and promotive of sleep, cheerfulness, and recuperation is best attained at Saratoga Springs. There nature has provided all the conditions necessary to secure and insure it — sunshine, ozone, breathing-room, and air worth breathing. It is only necessary that the Cur-guest shall put himself under the influence of these conditions. But do you know how to utilize or appropriate these conditions which nature has provided for you ( 92 SARATOGA CHIPS. Do you know how to rest ? Rest is given and taken. Best is given to those who are qualified for taking it. The qualification is a rare one among the Americans of the great Republic. Well, it will not be the fault of Saratoga, with its walks and drives and hotel piazzas, its quiet nooks for quiet souls, its diverting panorama at the Springs — it will not be the fault of Saratoga if it does not give you rest. It cannot give what w T ill not be taken. ALL THE BATHS. No Treatment or remedy is as old as the Water Treatment, and the older half of this treatment is bathing. Next to breathing comes bathing. We are no sooner born than we are bathed, and the last act of good-fellowship is an act of ablution, if not absolution, and neither the one nor the other can be performed without water. Even an alderman is not admitted to the penitentiary without a bath. The bath-tub plays a conspicuous part in the architecture and hygienics of history. The ruins of the baths of Caracalla, in Rome, compare in magnificence and impressiveness with those of the Coliseum. They covered a space of one hundred and forty thousand square yards, and accommodated nearly two thousand bathers at the same time. Their walls were of marble, their col- umns of variegated granite, their floors of mosaic of the most costly and striking description. They were adorned with urns, statuary, fountains, flower gardens, and vineyards. Here Shelley wrote his " Prometheus Unbound," and describes the intoxication that he felt as he roamed among the winding labyrinths, flowery glades, blossoming thickets, and dizzy arches sus- pended in the air. 94 SARATOGA CHIPS. Whoever lias seen St. George's Hall, Liverpool, lias seen an almost exact reproduction of only about one fourth of the baths of Caracalla, in Eorae. What must have been the aquatic grandeur and acoustic annoyances of the original ! Really now, come to think of it, a bath-tub is about the correct shape for an auditory, with the speaker on its bot- tom and at one end. If all the hotels of Saratoga Springs were consol- idated and reconstructed into a bathing establish- ment it would be a very small one in comparison with the- bathing facilities presented to their subjects by the classic emperors of the olden time. However, Saratoga enterprise should not seek to supplant but to supplement its hotels by a mammoth mineral-water sanitarium. That the capital thus invested would pay, Europe, Asia, and Carlsbad abundantly demonstrate. The baths of Diocletian covered about two hun- dred and ninety acres, and furnished separate accom- modations for thirty- two hundred bathers. Forty thousand men were employed in building them. The present ruins cover a space one mile in circum- ference. The Pantheon is supposed to have been the entrance to a bath-house. I was shown a hot sulphur spring in Italy where the Emperor Trajan used to bathe, and I find it described by Pliny, who was a guest of his majesty. Author and emperor have long since passed away, and the spring bubbles up as though nothing had BATHS OF CARACALLA. ALL THE BATHS. 97 happened. " Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever." And the men may reign or write ; it makes no difference. The ruins of enormous and highly-decorated bath edifices have been excavated under the town of Bath. They were doubtless built by the Romans. Among: the treasures of the treasure house of King Artuxerxes bestowed upon the house of God were one hundred baths of wine, one hundred baths of oil and salt, " without prescribing too much/' The Order of the Bath derives its name from the ceremony of ablution in the initiation of a knight. It was, as in religious rites, designed as an emblem of purity, and indicates that some who have passed through it might be the better for passing through it again. The reason why the Romans went into a decline, where they remain to this day, is because they overdid the Hot- Water Cure. They divided their time between the battle-field and the bath-tub, in- stead of anticipating Christopher Columbus in dis- covering us Americans. Josephus tells us that Herod tried the warm water nt Callirhoe for some ailment. It is to be hoped it was the croup, and that he is not cured of it yet. Drinking mineral water came long after bathing in it. Until about 1550, two centuries or more after its discovery, Carlsbad was, as its name imports, given 98 SARATOGA CHIPS. over exclusively to the Bath Cure. The Treatment was bathing exclusively. The legend is that the waters healed the wounds of both the Emperor Charles IY. and his dog, in 1350. They were hunting, and the dog followed a deer over the precipice into the spring, and recov- ered so rapidly of its fractures that his imperial master tried the waters on the wound he had re- ceived at the battle of Crecy, and with such success that he called the town after himself and his bath — Charlesbath. But Wary, or Warmbath, it seems, was the name of it long before it was named by the wounded monarch. From about 1350 to about 1550 the Emperor Charles IY. sat upon a seat hewn out of the solid rock, with his royal gout in the Sprndel, before it occurred to him or his medical adviser that the water might be as beneficial when you put it on the inside of you as when yon put yourself on the out- side of it. That the Bath Cure may have been resorted to as an amusement by the visitors to Carlsbad of that day is implied by the tart remark of Dr. Payer : " Nature has created this bath for patients and not for anybody's lust or amusement." Bathing is a luxury when it is designed to be. It is making a climate out of water. How the hounds enjoy it, and the pigs, and the scions of an expensively fur- nished house ! " First take a bath" is the order of Ulysses in his ALL THE BATHS. 99 preparations for the counterfeit wedding that was to ensnare the suitors to their fate. Ulysses is the most illustrious of the Knights of the Bath. He seems to have spent a considerable portion of his time in the salt water, and was, in consequence, enabled to be as decollete in his costume as the most fashionable of Washington society could exact. There were arrangements for taking a bath at the entrance of the residences of the Greek swells. I believe the Greeks still commemorate the mar- tyrdom of St. Patricias 'by pilgrimages to a hot spring called Kurkutlus, into which their saint was thrown for refusing sacrifices to the gods. When heathenism disappeared fire was substituted for water. There are hot springs at the pass of Thermopylae, and to this day their clouds of vapor rise as incense to the memory of Leonidas and his three hundred heroes, who might have won the fight if the water in which they bathed had been cold instead of hot. A cold bath for a hot contest. It is not likely that all the baths can be called by name, as they are perpetually multiplying, and those who have the multiplying of them are not in- nocent of the disposition to increase their number without altering their character. Remedies, like maladies, are in the hands of those who amuse them- selves and confound the lexicographers with inex- plicable additions to medical nomenclature. Some of the baths are : the common-water bath, 100 SARATOGA CHIPS. the iron- water bath, the sulphur- water bath, the salt-water bath, the rain-water bath, the electro- magnetic bath, the compressed-air bath, the electro- chemical bath, the medicated bath, the gas bath, the smoke bath, the vapor bath, the sheet bath, the hot-air bath, the pine bath, the sand bath, the mud bath, the animal bath, the Turkish bath, the Irish bath, the Russian bath, the needle bath, the spray bath, the wave bath, the cataract bath, the douche bath, the shower bath, the swimming bath, the thermal or hot bath, the cold bath, the tepid bath, the vertical bath, the oblique bath, the ascending bath, and —going in to swim. For the Animal Bath the body is wrapped in the skin of an animal that has just been slaughtered, or the diseased part of the patient is put into the body or blood of the recently killed animal. If yon ask for a Smoke Bath you will be put up to your chin into what is called a fumigating box filled with vapor of sulphur or mercury. To secure a Chlorine Bath the body is enclosed up to the chin in a box filled with chlorine, which generates extreme heat, and is followed by a prickly eruption and profuse perspiration. The Gas Bath is administered through a hole in the box, which encloses your body and leaves out your head. The gas used is generally carbonic-acid gas. A stream of carbonic-acid gas is directed into the ear for the cure of deafness, and upon a sore leg or ALL THE BATHS. 101 an enlarged liver, and may be tried without success upon a swelled head. The Turkish Bath, sometimes called the perspira- tion bath, is a basin bath in Turkey, to begin with, followed by a shampoo in a warm room, and then by a rubbing down in another room full of vapor, which starts the perspiration, and then by an old- fashioned wash of soap and water, and then by pipe and coffee and a doze on a lounge. The Sheet Bath was introduced by Priessnitz. We are wrapped in a wet sheet, wringing wet with cold water. This is repeated at intervals of an hour or so, alternated with a plunge bath, and rub- bing with a dry towel, and a, shower and a done/,, bath, always with cold water. Tin's treatment lias variations and modifications, and may be kept up all day long, with ample intermissions and three very frugal meals, "with plain water as the only bev- erage. There is no doubt of the efficacy of cold water, whether put on the body with sheet, or hand, or douche, for insomnia, cold feet, or hot head, or as a preventive against catching cold by exposure. It may be resorted to either before or after the ex- posure. For the throat, plain cold water dashed on with the hand and rubbed off with a coarse towel is a preventive of internal inflammation, as old as it is sure. In every case — for cold extremities, irregu- lar circulation, nervousness or irritability, or in- 102 SARATOGA CHIPS. ability to sleep — throw on the water quickly, and as quickly rub it off. The consequent glow is one of the most refreshing of the innumerable sensations known to the only animal addicted to sensational friction or fiction. Cold water, like cold air, is invigorating ; warm water, like warm air, is debilitating. Never take a warm bath in the morning or just before going out. A cold bath in the morning and any time during the night, if you cannot sleep, but be very quick about it. You may save yourself from a hard cold or pneumonia and one of its premature consequences by a quick cold foot bath the moment you arrive at home with cold or wet feet. The Pennes Bath, which I name after the French- man who concocted it, is compounded of delphine, bromide of potassium, sulphate of alumina, sulphate of lime, sulphate of iron, sulphate of soda, phos- phate of soda, and aromatic oils. If you find your- self entirely alive after one of these baths, you may try another. The Mud, or Peat, or Moor Bath is, one would think, anything but a pretty circus, nevertheless it was put on exhibition when it was introduced, and the enterprising exhibitor made a prodigious sensa- tion and a great deal of money by its introduction to the scrofulous monarchs and gouty nobility of fifty years ago. The exhibitor would exhibit him- ALL THE BATHS. 103 self for hours, buried to the beard in this poultice of mineralized and heated peat. One M.D. (mud "doctor) wore a pig-tail, which was platted and tied up like a horse's tail, while lie was taking his mud bath in public on the country road. The Indians have for ages been in the habit of rubbing themselves with the mud of the Ganges. My first experience in a mud bath occasioned me the loss of more self-respect than any other act of my life, except the taking of a mortgage on a West- ern farm ; but I can easily imagine how easily the imagination can be gratified by a treatment that ap- peals to it so strangely and strongly. No man with an aesthetic sense of the fitness of things would con- sent to sit in his own presence in a tub of black mud for three-quarters of an hour, without feeling that the degradation of his position was fully com- mensurate with the magnitude of his disorder. As the fundamental virtue of the moor or peat used consists in its being decayed vegetation, one would infer that the muck which is found in abun- dance near Saratoga Springs would, when charged with hot mineral water, answer every purpose of the hepatic and rheumatic, and it will. If a new name is necessary, let ours be called a Muck Bath of an expensive variety, and its success is guaran- teed. Frazenbad, which is noted for its mud baths, is in a peat bog, very like in color and consistency the muck swamps in the vicinity of Saratoga. 104- SARATOGA CHIPS. These swamps would furnish material enough to keep thirteen hundred and seventeen bath-tubs in motion for thirteen hundred and seventeen years, and would cure one million three hundred and seventeen thousand four hundred and two Ameri- cans of their sour disposition, brought on by living in New York and sending ice-cream and pickles down the same alimentary canal. The baths at Schlangenbad are very popular with those who wish to iron out their wrinkles and whiten out their tan and freckles, and so put a bet- ter face on their matrimonial proposals. This cutaneous efficacy of the water illustrates the failure of analysis, to which I have devoted one of my chapters, for the man with the retort and caloric finds no reason for this effect in the constituents of the water, and abandons the conundrum in despair. But, then, as I contend elsewhere, we do not need to know the nature of what benefits us any more than we need to know what is the matter with us. The Neubad, at Carlsbad, was built in 1880, at a cost of about forty thousand dollars, and contains twenty-two mud baths and twenty-four mineral baths. The tubs for the first-class invalids are made of porcelain, those for invalids of the second class are made of w T ood. The porcelain is as sure to cure you of sciatica as a diamond earring is to cure your wife of wanting a coachman in livery for her daughter's husband. ALL THE BA.THS. 105 The Europe of William and Francis Josef and Bismarck charges you ten cents for your towels and two cents for your soap. So that if you really get your bath per se, so to speak — that is, the water and the tub for twenty-five cents in Euroj)e, you can hardly come out of it clean and dry without paying forty cents. When the United States of America gives you a bath it furnishes the towels and the soap, as well as the water and the tub. Xor does it charge you for the air you breathe while you are taking your bath. At Royat, France, they make much of mineral- ized steam baths. The steam is applied to the rheumatic part by means of a hose, or it is sys- tematically inhaled by the gourmand from Paris or New York. The mineral water is also sprayed upon the pass- ages of nose or throat afflicted with catarrh. Some- times the stream is reduced to a knitting-needle, and this ought to be called the Knitting- Needle Bath. When the water is thrown on with a hose by one man, another man rubs it off with a towel that brings the skin off with it. That is very exhilarating. At Leuk we sit in the bath and knit in the bath ; we read in the bath and nap in the bath ; we back- bite in the bath and play cards in the bath, and, in short, are entirely too long in the bath. Overdone bathing has got so many in hot water that its hours have been numbered. Few places now tolerate the all-day wallow. 106 SARATOGA CHIPS. Old wounds are cured by mineral- water baths, and are therefore strongly recommended to politi- cians whose feelings have been wounded by the cartoonists and lampoonists, and to susceptible young chaps who have been jilted. Fortunate is the workingman who has mineral mud to work in, especially if he has poison in his blood or if his bones are full of the sins of his youth. The man who was employed at Bourbon- Lancy, in 1807, to clear out the conduits, was cured of sores on his leg which had crippled him from his birth! The same service under the same circum- stances would have killed him on the spot if he had been a sound man. Siinilia similibus curantur ! There is generally a Complaint Book in the bath- houses, in which you record not the complaint for which you are undergoing the Treatment, but the criticisms you may have to make upon the obse- quious attendant, who may be doubtful of his tip. A physician from Scotland notes the tenderness and patience of the rubbers and shampooers. So did I, although I may not have been blind to the fact that the eye of the servant in Europe looketh unto the hand of the American. Bathing is to this day as much depended upon as drinking at all the mineral-water resorts of Europe and the East. The bath-tubs of Europe are as richly endowed as their wine cellars or their chairs of Sanscrit, while ours are as deficient in endowment as our ALL THE BATHS. ior chairs of Plain English. The ingenuity, archi- tecture, and capital bestowed upon this department at all European mineral-water resorts are very noticeable to Americans, who are accustomed to see this arm of the recruiting service hanging listlessly at the side or absent altogether. It is a very un- sagacious deficiency. Some of the most complete and luxuriant bath establishments in the world are at Carlsbad, Baden- Baden, Brnsa, Aix-les-Bains, and Cheltenham. Buxton, and Busliey, in England. At Buxton, England, the edifices erected for the baths and the conveniences furnished for the bathers are worth a voyage to see. Nothing nearer than the Orient can surpass them in luxuriance. Around them stretch in every direction one hundred acres of walks in the midst of the far-famed scenery of Derbyshire. There are in the Old World about two thousand mineral-water resorts, where bathing is made and provided for as a specialty. In some, in many of these places, especially those of the East, it is the main dependence for gathering visitors, Cur-guests, and income. The number of people, well and ill and idiopathic, who annually frequent these resorts, on purpose to avail themselves of their baths, are, at the lowest calculation, five hundred thousand. If these five hundred thousand Cur-guests were de- prived of their baths, they would seek and not find them in America !— in enterprising America ! A SHOWER BATH. ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. TnE patient patient of the Mineral-Water Treat- ment should not be disheartened by the perplexities of the analysts or their differences of opinion. They are not averse to terrifying us with the re- sults of their investigations. They can inform us without a shudder, with even the twinkling eye of professional enthusiasm, that we drink enough arsenic in mineral water to kill us, if wo were to he killed in that way, and that a rabbit has been de- prived of its entire existence by no more theine than we take in our cup of tea, and no more caffeine than we take in our cup of coffee. Another analytical bug- aboo employed to alarm the unsuspecting laity is the fact that there are as many living creatures in one drop of water as there are human beings on the face of the earth — that is, about five hundred millions ! So that in a glass of pure, clear, delicious, and re- freshing water we imbibe about a million hundred millions members of the animal creation. Such is life ! It is sustained upon what will bring it to an end, if it has the opportunity. Bold Gam- betta was found after his death to be as largely im- pregnated with the chlorides and iodides as the rock 110 SARATOGA CHIPS. around the Sprudel. He died of his remedy. Any water may kill. A friend of mine died of drinking typhoid-fever in one glass of the purest-looking well water that ever slaked a burning thirst. How good it tasted, how bad it acted ! At this point my newspaper brings me the num- ber of living bacteria in the iced water drunk by New York, and gives as its authority a specialist in bacilli. Dr. T. Mitchell Prudden. Upon this authority we learn that with every glass of iced water the New Yorker swallows from fifty-nine thou- sand to three hundred and seventy thou- sand living bac- teria. The Cro- ton supplies about fifty-eight thousand in every half pint and the crystal ice of the Hudson River about three hundred and twenty-two thousand more. At some points of the picturesque Hudson, Dr. Prudden tells us, a half pint of pure water contains five hundred thousand bacteria ! Fourteen million cubic centimetres of sewage pour into the Hudson River every day ! In two towns there are seventy- RESIDENCE OF HON. GEORGE S. BATCHELLER. ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. Ill five deaths a year from typhoid-fever, engendered by the universal beverage of their inhabitants — iced water ! Need we wonder that the learned specialist calls upon the State Board of Health for a rigorous in- spection of ice-making on the Hudson { Here is another argument against the iced water of the American of the United States, which is closing out as many insurance policies now as avarice or stoves in the railway cars. While the water may he wholesome, the ice may be fatal. Here, too, is another argument in favor of min- eral water, it needs no ice, its natural temperature is exactly right, except when it is better for the patient that it should be warm. The resident of Saratoga, who is indebted to its springs for his table water, as well as his remedial beverage, will miss his place of residence exceed- ingly when he goes away from home. Especially and emphatically will he miss the bubbling foun- tains when he suspects that his beverage contains fifty-eight thousand of his fellow-creatures, and the lump of ice in it designed to make it palatable con- tains by actual count three hundred and twenty-two thousand more ! So that ignorance of the constit- uents of our beverages is bliss to those who drink them, for if we find our suspicions verified in one instance, they will be aroused in every other, and the result will be that we shall perish of panic rather than gratify our thirst. 112 SARATOGA CHIPS. Even if the constituents of the water could be made remedial by simply being committed to mem- ory, they would be out of our reach, for the reason that they are out of the reach of those who are in pursuit of them. If a knowledge of them is unat- tainable, how is it to be made available ? It is conceded by our analytical authorities that there are several constituents of mineral water which elude analysis, but which are quite as potential as any that they succeed in capturing and labelling. Dr. Glover, a high authority in mineral waters, says, * Chemical analyses do not give the exact con- stituents of the water as existing in it, they only give the bases and the acids. These are afterward combined, according to certain theoretical rules, as they are supposed to exist in the water." Again he says, " Chemistry does not in every instance give the exact constitution of a water," and quotes another authority as saying that " in analyzing waters we only dissect their carcasses." The temperature itself amounts to an ingredient, since water cannot heat or cool without causing a redistribution of its constituents and a release of some of them. Common air is another ingredient. So is carbonic-acid gas, "partly united" or alto- gether " free," and nitrons gas, together with alka- lies and acids, innumerable and intangible. Vege- table matter plays its subtle and elusive part in this curious and evasive compound. The ancient Romans found conferva in their waters, and used it ANALYTICAL DIFFICULTIES. 113 for dressing their wounds. A plant called anabaine exists in the waters of Dax and Niris, and a sub- stance called siilfuraire in those of the Pyrenees, and another called oscillaria calli la in those of Vichy and Carlsbad. Another indefinable substance is ({noted by the chemists of an ' ; organic veg -to-ani- mal " nature. Analysis revels in vocabulary, and hyphens as metaphysics in clouds of words. Perhaps no analysis of mineral water is to be com- pared in rhetorical efficacy with that of Mount Dorc, which is called phthisisicentibus medicabiles. Waters that defy the chemists to lin bring them together. As my observation and testi- mony are that of a layman, it will be wise for me to secure the opinion of American physicians who are conversant with the facts in both this country and Europe. I have consulted several, and all con- cur with the one whom I now quote, Dr. Clarence C. Rice, of New York, who published a sensible and valuable article in the New York Medical Journal for October 1:6th, 1886, on ''How the Therapeutic Value of Our Mineral-Springs may be Increased." Dr. Ttice took pains, while visiting the foreign springs, to gather the opinions of his profession with respect to the Mineral-Water Cure, and his conclusions are as valuable as they are disinterested. 146 SARATOGA CHIPS. He was u impressed with the enthusiasm of the European physicians over their mineral waters. They seemed never tired of talking of them, and have great faith in their curative properties. " In Europe the Mineral- Water Treatment has cc the endorsement of the medical profession." " Mineral- Water Treatment forms quite a large portion of the therapeutics recommended by Yon J^iemeyer in his 'Text-Book of Medicine, 5 and he speaks in no doubtful man- ner, as, for ex- ample : ' In our present state of knowledge, a course of water at Carlsbad is the measure which should deserve the chief reliance as a remedy for diabetes mellitus.' In the treatment of renal calculus, Sir Henry Thompson says, ' Of all medicinal remedies, perhaps none are so valuable as mineral waters ;' and Trousseau and Murchison speak in the same emphatic terms in respect to the treatment of other diseases." In this country Dr. Rice has been struck with -«^J|^'-- RESIDENCE OF W. B. GAGE, ESQ. THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 147 " the half-hearted manner in which the physicians advised the use of the mineral waters. The high- est praise they could pay them was that they could do no harm." Dr. Rice advocates a concert of action on the part of the practitioners of this country, similar to that of the faculty in Europe. " I do not mean subscribing to the advertisement of any company who are bottling the waters of some spring, but physicians, individually or in committees, appointed for the purpose, should have careful analyses made, and they should ascertain by clinical investigation the therapeutical value of our mineral waters, and if they are found to be valu- able medicinal agents, they should be given a place as such in our materia medicas. " My observing and interviewing lead me to the same conclusion as that at which Dr. Rice has ar- rived. The European physician prescribes mineral water as a remedy in which he has enthusiastic con- fidence ; the American physician recommends it as, at best, a beverage which may have remedial quali- ties. Of course there are exceptions, but this, as Dr. Rice affirms, is the rule. So when we take into consideration the fact that the mineral springs of Europe are under municipal control, in some cases owned by the national gov- ernment, which prevents rivalry and insures cheap- ness, and are endorsed by the medical learning of all Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Khedive's do- 148 SARATOGA CHIPS. minions, we have no difficulty in accounting for the enormous number of people who visit the European springs, and the vast amount of money they leave behind them when they mount the train for home. The rulers believe in these springs, the doctors be- lieve in them, the hotel proprietors believe in them, the fashionable dyspeptics believe in them, and the poor, who have no drugs to pay for or doctors to pay, believe in them, for the Mineral-Water Treat- ment is open to the poorest, without money and witho # ut price. The motto is, " Ho, every one that thirsteth, come." The financial interests of the State, the faculty, and the hostelries combine with the mental credulity and bodily infirmities of the morbid anthropoid to bear the mineral- water traffic. Carlsbad, then, in the magnitude and magnifi- cence of its conveniences for the Mineral- Water Treatment, including drinking and bathing, has, as we have seen, all of Europe, and all of Asia, and all the Eastern world on its side. It has antiquity and the majority on its side. The Mineral-Water Treatment was the first Treat- ment, was once the universal Treatment, and is to this hour the most prevalent Treatment. It was practised by the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks and Eomans, with a solemn sense of gratitude to the gods. The temples of Esculapius are found near mineral springs. The Greek doctors prescribed mineral THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 149 waters, not to humor their patients, but to cure their humors. The Mineral- Water Treatment has the whole animal creation on its side. Man was not the first animal to be benefited by mineral water, nor are we, who know how to read and write, the only members of our family who know of its efficacy. The aboriginal American drank of the Saratoga waters long before they cured the dyspepsia of their civilized successors. All the animals below us drink of the mineral springs with alacrity and relish. They are as fond of salt as we are, and gather at the " salt licks" with all the regularity and hilarity with which their human superiors throng the hotels of Saratoga and Carlsbad. Such, indeed, is the accuracy of the instinct of the ruminants at Vichy, that the fashionable invalids are guided by it. When the spring comes, and the snow melts, and the winds from the mountains drive away the vapors from the vallevs, the beasts of the forests flock to the waters, for it is then that the waters are at their best, and it is then that " the season" is pronounced " open" by the world of fashion and disease. Indeed, it is maintained by eminent members of the learned faculty that more remedies have been discovered by the instinct of animals and barbarians than by the reasoning of the books or the experi- ence of the practitioners. Horses were cured of epizooties at Vichy, in 150 SARATOGA CHIPS. 1818, by drinking of what is used by man as a "table water." Does it change in composition or does it have a different effect upon different branches of the ascending scale ? The sjDring at Inverleitben, which enjoys the dis- called Doo Well, because of the doo-ing sound of the voices of the pigeons that gather there to drink. Those at Saratoga might be called cooing, because of the lovers who come there to coo. The springs at Bagnoles owe their discovery, we are told, to their rejuvenating effect upon an aged horse. The owner, thoughtlessly supposing that a bullet in the horse's head was more cruel than death by starvation and exposure, turned the poor old brute out to die. Two months after, as he hap- pened to be passing, the horse galloped toward him, vigorous, fat, and sleek. The astonished owner found, upon watching the brute, that he was accus- tomed to wallow in a marsh, which was found to be quite hot. This led to the discovery of the hot spring, which has ever since been noted for its effi- cacy in renewing the health of the animal creation, biped and quadruped. The discovery of the Schlangenbad Waters is quite as pathetic and authentic. It is the story of a restored heifer. Her association with the human family resulted in her sharing its dyspepsia. Nothing agreed with her. She grew thinner and thinner, her hips protruded, and she became a con- THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 151 firmed hypochondriac. She was given up by her doctor, her owner, and the milkmaid. Then she suddenly disappeared, and everybody supposed she went on imitating our species to the point of " sui- cide while in a state of unsound mind," when she reappeared, entirely restored. Her eye was clear, her skin smooth, she had " grown fat as the heifer at grass," and her tenderloin steak had grown pro- portionately tempting. The herdsman shadowed her, and traced her to a fountain of mineral water far away in the forest. There she would pause for a moment, as if saying a Quaker grace, then drank slowly, and then walked slowly back to the herd. This is how we come to have the spring of silicious matter and delicious water in the little Duchy of Nassau. The herdsman who acted the detective on the heifer recommended the water to a maiden of Nassau who was afflicted with the heifer's malady, and was as speedily and radically cured. Sick horses are taken great distances to the springs of La Raillere, where they drink vigorously and are cured speedily. At Gastein the work-horses are strengthened by a bath which renders idle horses and idle boys unmanageable. The farmers of Aus- tria send their cattle to bathe in the waters of Schlangenbad. Bladud became a leper, and was banished by his father, King Hudibras, whereupon lie infected some pigs with his leprosy. The pigs were cured by drinking the waters of Bath, and Bladud fol- 152 SARATOGA CHIPS. lowed their example, with the same beneficent re- sult. Here, however, we may as well consider the com- mon question, which is well worthy of consider- ation, Cannot this Mineral- Water Treatment be practised at home ? Undoubtedly it can to a con- siderable extent, even where the mineral water is " on draught," with different names for the same beverage. Many a man of great usefulness in his day and generation would have perished in his first struggle for existence, if he had been dependent for his sustenance upon " nature's fount." But if that is closed against you, the next best thing is the bottle, whether the treatment be lacteal or saline. The original sources are always to be pre- ferred, however, whether in the case of caseine, the sacred books, or chloride of sodium. Hence, the mineral springs themselves are to be preferred to the artificial founts for the Mineral- Water Treat- ment, and hence that Treatment certainly can be practised at home, if your home is Saratoga. However, if home means business, grinding and consuming business, whether a man's in the shop or a woman's in the house, it will be necessary to go away from home to get away from the grind, care, and worry, no matter where the home may be. You may be the better for a new gallery of faces. You may even wish to try a worse climate, in order to demonstrate the superiority of your own, which you are sure to do if you move east or west, north THE MIXEKAL-WATER TREATMENT. 153 or south of Saratoga. The prodigal son must come to himself, the morbid vertebrate must get away from himself. To Carlsbad or Saratoga he may have to go, in order to give the mind a rest and the liver a jog. The provisions made at Carlsbad for distracting the mind of the business-ridden American from his exhausting occupation at home are prodigious. There is so much that is amusing in the crowds and so much that is beguiling in the landscape, that the most sourly in earnest American is cured of his morbid devotion to his country or his kind. He gets himself taken clean out of himself, and gets himself cleaned out as well. He sees nothing that he sees at home, and knows nobody that he knows at home, and does nothing that he is accus- tomed to do at home. He even ceases to be dead in earnest, which is a great relief to not only himself, but to all his comrades and associates. Then, if distance lends enchantment to the rem- edy, it will promote the efficacy of the Treatment. A foreign tour, in acting upon the credulous imagi- nation, facilitates the action of the water on the system. Or if it is the foreign tour itself that ef- fects the cure by the mineral water, the tour is as indispensable as the water. The merit of the chlo- rides consists in their being so difficult of access and so expensive to reach. This is why it is that we are obliged to go abroad in order to secure the benefit of the remedy that we 154 SAKAT0GA CHIPS. leave behind at home. It is not the same remedy, inasmuch as going away to get it is just what makes it efficacious. This is not satirical or ironical. It is ministering to a mind diseased, which is done by every physician who ministers to a diseased body. I do not believe there is enough difference be- tween the waters of Carlsbad and those of Saratoga (especially if the latter are heated) to make any dif- ference in the efficacy of the Mineral-Water Treat- ment. For three years I have been an inveterate drinker of Saratoga mineral waters, and shall never cease to be grateful to them so long as I am free from the distressing sensations which they have re- moved. Nor can I doubt for a moment that these waters can do what any other mineral waters can do. Their efficacy is as well assured as those of any valley- in the world. It is the opinion of Professor Tyndall that there are " no thermo-electric conditions that could cause any perceptible difference between the therapeutic action of natural hot water and artificial hot water." This makes the artificial hot water of Saratoga just as therapeutic as the water fresh from the crater of the Carlsbad volcano. Other scientists may dis- agree with the learned professor, and leave us stranded on the bleak exposure of our own com- mon-sense. Hot springs have this advantage of the cold, they take a stronger hold of the morbid imagination of THE MINERAL-WATER TREATMENT. 155 the invalid vertebrate. He likes his remedy to have a temperature as well as a twang. Hence thermal water is more popular, although from its inferiority in minerals it may be less likely to be effective. On the other hand, the cold spring has the ad- vantage of having nothing but its mineral merits to recommend it. Like a candidate for Congress, if it fails of constituents, it fails of election. Cold springs must be meritorious, irrespective of climate, scenery, or historical associations. Hot springs may have nothing but their temperature to excite the hopes and beguile the imagination. Here is where the Mind Cure lends a hand. Dr. Rice testifies that u Carlsbad has not a greater reputation for curing people so much because its waters are better medicinally than those of Sara- toga, as because patients at Carlsbad are under bet- ter therapeutic conditions." In other words, Carls- bad means the Carlsbad Treatment, which is in the main a Mineral- Water Treatment, while Saratoga means, as I have endeavored to show elsewhere, far more than any kind of Treatment, except that which includes them all — climate, water, rest, home, and gayety. But the fact that Saratoga means more than the Mineral-Water Treatment, so far from proving that that Treatment should be neglected, proves that it should be incorporated and main- tained in all its features and to its full extent, in baths, drink, and diet. The Saratoga waters are not only just as effective as those of Carlsbad, but 156 SARATOGA CHIPS. compass by their variety a much larger number of people who need them. There is no excuse for the absence of the Mineral- Water Treatment at Saratoga to be found in its waters, while every other therapeutic condition is supplied beyond any other spa between the two poles of this hemisphere — climate, location, ac- commodations for people in all stages of consump- tion and impecuniosity, and opportunity for home- life all the year round. Those who delight in the mineral elixir of Saratoga, whether they use it as a cure or as a beverage, will never know the luxury of it until they can dip it from the fountain and drink it at their leisure. I am satisfied that that opportunity is an important factor in the Mineral- Water Cure. Let us not be misunderstood. The Mineral- Water Treatment, bath and all, is certainly practised at Saratoga (one spring gave two thousand baths last year), but not with such publicity, and emphasis, and advertisement as to rival the foreign establishments and to divert the stream of Cur-guests, who are flocking in increasing numbers every year to the waters of Carlsbad and the bath-tubs of Baden- Baden. Our mineral-water establishments should, like those of Europe and the Orient, assert with archi- tectural emphasis their place and part in the econ- omy of recuperation. They should be as conspicu- ous as our hotels and as widely known. They THE MIX Ell A L- WATER TREATMENT. 157 would rival the hotels in drawing power, and pre- vent the necessity of closing them just when beauti- ful October spreads her banquet for the Cur-guest. Even if the Treatment is no more than one of the fussinesses resorted to by the morbid biped, it is to be regarded and incorporated as indispensable to a place consecrated to the restoration of health. To neglect it altogether, or to treat it with indiffer- ence, or to wait until it is called for before it is pro- vided, is not only to do this business as no other business is done, but to disregard the teachings of history and the example of the whole world. It is said the American would not support min- eral-water establishments on the scale of those at foreign spas. The answer is that they patronize them wherever they find them, and one reason why they make so much of them and pay so much for them abroad, is because they do not get the oppor- tunity at home. The baths are especially popular. The Cur-guest from every land revels in the bath like a porpoise in the sea. Will it pay ? is a question never answered until we can answer the question, Has it paid I The de- mand seldom conies before the supply, and if there is an exception to the rule, it is the human animal's search for remedial beverages and curative ablution. If it generally pays to create a demand for unneces- sary things by supplying them, it certainly ought to pay to meet a demand which is the clamor of those in torment for release from their pain, and of the 158 SARATOGA CHIPS. dying for an arrest of the malady that is killing them. The instinct that provided these baths came of the instinct that demanded them. The disordered genus homo was found to be amphibious in his remedial inclinations, and it was found that it would pay to provide for their gratification. No sooner thought than done. That is the history of the Bath Treatment, of the Mineral-Water Treat- ment, and of every treatment, and of all kinds of business designed to make money out of the freaks and whrms, the oddities and necessities, of the hu- man family. Again it is said, by way of excusing our poor show of capital and public spirit in the Mineral- Water Treatment, that the foreign springs and baths are under Government control, while ours are de- pendent upon private enterprise. The answer is not American. We argue that private enterprise is bolder and wiser and in every way better for the public than Government patronage or the support of the State. Europe is dull, slow, behind the times, and an old fogy. America is smart, fast, up with the times, and young-manny. It will not do to use this argument to prove the superiority of our hotel system, and repudiate it to account for our in- feriority in hydropathic zeal. If private enterprise is sagacious, it will not fail where sagacity is so much needed, and so easy of attainment, and al- ways pays so well, as in dealing with the infirmities THE MINERAL-WATER, TREATMENT. 159 of the morbid vertebrate, with as many millions in bank as lie has ills in his flesh. It will not do for Saratoga to sneer at the walks between drinks, or neglect the zwieback, or poo-poo the shampoo, or to treat the Mineral- Water Remedy with indifference while it is drawing every year half a million of people who pay their board-bill in cash, and an immense number of them carrying their cash from this country at that. Should Saratoga be excelled by Carlsbad in die tetic enterprise or by the Turks in bath-tubs i THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. The Carlsbad Treatment is a Mineral Water Treatment exclusively ; the Saratoga Treatment is a Climate Treatment as well as a Mineral- Water Treat- ment, and when these two departments are as well known and as well united as they ought to be and will be, no health resort in the world will compare with Saratoga in " therapeutic conditions" or in the number of those; who avail themselves of them. Old as it is, and famous as it is, and popular as its waters, and hotels, and boarding-houses are, Sar- atoga Springs as the place for those who are seek- ing a permanent home in a curative climate is com- paratively unknown. The statement may surprise some, but it is made after a careful and prolonged investigation. Of the multitudes who know of and think of Saratoga as a fashionable resort for the month of August, very few know anything of its advantages as a harbor to anchor in or a recruiting station for the faculties that have been jaded or broken in the struggle for existence. Saratoga as a Climate Treatment it is our duty to proclaim. A fashionable resort it certainly is, and ought to be, and will undoubtedly continue to be so long as its livery and boarding-houses are the best in the 102 SAKATOGA CHIPS. world and so long as its hotels continue to surpass all others in combining all the luxuries of a palace with all the comforts of a home. Even the hotels, with all their luxury and splendor, have a civilized regard for the laws of dietetics, for they eat dinner in the middle of the day. Saratoga as a health resort or a Climate Treat- ment has never been advertised or boomed, and, of course, for good and suffi- cien t reasons. W h e n it is everybody's business to ad- vertise only his own interests, it is nobody's busi- ness to advertise the interests of the whole. This is unavoidable, and no one is to blame for it. This leaves the place, however, with its incomparable advantages and opportuni- ties for an all-the-y ear-round home, down on a par and level with places where nothing can sur- vive, except a crocodile or a seal, for two thirds of the year. If one half the money that has been ex- pended in advertising hair tonics for bald heads and whiskey "bitters" for the blood had been RESIDENCE OF GEN. W. B. FRENCH. THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 163 spent in proclaiming the tonical efficacy of the Sar- atoga climate, Union Avenue would have been built to its eastern boundary and the whole plateau would now be covered with the comfortable homes of those who are languishing with malarial fever or have died of consumption, without so much as hearing of, to say nothing of seeing, this land of brooks of water. Saratoga as pre-eminently the location and the clime for a permanent and sanitary residence is 1o this moment a matter of individual discovery rather than of general knowledge. To the most of those of us who have arrived at last in Saratoga, after lon^ search and much lost time and health, it was as acci- dental and incidental a discovery as that of the silver mines of Mexico by the hunter who pulled up a bush by the roots in tumbling over the rocks. To multitudes who would now gladly avail them- selves of its recuperative air, if they knew of it, it is as unknown as are the sources of the Nile to those who live upon its banks. Those who are now need- ing it will have to discover it for themselves one by one, unless, indeed, they read and believe what I say here, and act upon their confidence in my testimony — the testimony of one who speaks from experience as full of gladness in the end as it was of sadness in the beginning. This testimony, however, is not disinterested. It comes of gratitude to Saratoga for its climate, and waters, and of a meek and lowly interest in its real estate. Disinterested motives are 164 SARATOGA CHIPS. impossible, and interested motives are not wicked, and all motives are mixed. My case is one of an innumerable number. I too was a discoverer, so far as my health was con- cerned, like Charles IY. or Sir "William Johnson. When the time came to flee or to break, with all that that imports, death being the least of what it imports, I reconnoitred the neighborhood of New York and Philadelphia, the Catskills, the Berkshire hills, the glorious Adirondack forests, the Hudson, the sea-side, and the suburban villages. I consulted the b£st authorities on climate, and, after two years lost in this investigation and consultation, I took the advice of Dr. Justin R. Loomis, of New York, who made a remark which doubtless he has forgotten, but which I never can forget, for never was wisdom better justified of her words, or words of prophecy more accurately fulfilled. After running over with me the names of a mul- titude of places in New York. New England, and New Jersey, he said, " If you want a place to live in for all or most of the year Saratoga is by all odds the place for you and your wife. They have a sandy Plateau there, which is a spot of nature's own making for people who need pure air, natural drainage, sunshine, and freedom from malaria. A place more free from malaria and the causes of malaria I could not name." I do not profess to give the precise words of Professor Loomis, but the substance and meaning THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 165 of them are in the words I have set down here, as the testimony of one who is abundantly qualified as a witness and the testimony of the one who acted upon his advice, and who repeats it with emphasis to every one he can reach who is breaking' with in- cipient consumption, or nervous prostration, or any diseases or disorders that come of overwork or over-worry. Lying off toward the sunrising is the Saratoga Plateau which has just been alluded to. It is about a mile and a half wide and about two miles long, and is pronounced by experts in soil and climate to be the very spot for the human animal to live on and thrive on in winter and in summer, in spring and autumn. The sand for consumptives, asthmatics, rheu- matics, and malariatics— sand, and sunshine, and showers, cool nights in summer and steady cold and good sleighing in winter. That is the Saratoga Plateau, which of all spots on this planet is designed of nature to " cleanse the foul body of the infected world." It is well up out of everything clammy and well away from everything vile. It is clean. It abounds in the best water to be found in the bowels of the earth. It is beautiful for situation. It commands the Adirondacks and the hills of the Hudson, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the world-renowmed hotels in the valley of the springs. The drainage is quick and easy. The sand is 166 SARATOGA CHIPS. about nine thousand feet deep — deep enough for a cellar which will always be dry and warm. The Saratoga Plateau reminds us of what is called " the King's Summit" in the highlands of Ceylon. That also is an elevated plateau, whither the lowlanders of the island flee to escape the tropi- cal vermin and diseases, just as our esteemed coun- trymen of the Southern States and the Ohio River are beginning to flee to Saratoga, to escape the miasma that envelops them all the year round, for the want of a sharp winter to cut it out and drive it off. But even on the top of the King's Summit the atmosphere is debilitating. It is seldom colder than our May and often hotter than our August. Nor is it free from the terrible monsoon that hangs over the plains and shakes the mountains with a thunder-storm snch as never terrified an inhabitant of the temperate zone. Furthermore, " the King's Snmmit," like all the rest of the professional climates, may as well be in the planet Mercury, for all the attractions it has for the wretched invalid, who would rather die of con- sumption in Boston than of homesickness in Ceylon. The Saratoga Plateau may not be as high in the air as the King's Summit, but, on the other hand, it is not so far from the entertaining metropolis of the New World, or illustrious Ithaca, where Ulysses was born, or prosperous Troy, which could only be THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 167 conquered by the classical cavalry of the wooden horse. Saratoga is geographically well situated for a sanitary residence. It is easy of access to the neu- ralgic and gastralgic, just as Peruvian bark is found close to a region given over to intermittent fevers ; and kousso, the tape-worm remedy, abounds near where that disease is prevalent. No kousso will cure the tape- worm of Wall Street, however. Only a life of quietness and sanity at Saratoga will stop the gnawing avarice of that rather tough worm on your little inside. It costs little to get here, and not much to live here, and everybody else is near by. You may be in the world and out of it. The world will come to you, and get board with you, and you may even get bored with it. You may start for New York when you go to bed, and be in New York when you arise, and but- ton-hole your member at Washington for an office before the sun sets on your scheme. The invalid vertebrate may find temporary relief in places where he dare not remain, as, for exam- ple, at the North Pole or on the Bahama Islands. They are too cold or too warm, too windy or too watery, or too far from society. Florida will do for spring, and the White Mountains for summer, and the top of St. Bernard for an hour and a half in mid- summer, but the Cur-guest without a fortune cannot invest in real estate on the mountain or the ocean, 168 SARATOGA CHIPS. and even if lie has inherited the coupons, he cannot make a permanent home of his investment by the sea. On the contrary, every one of the fifty thousand who mounts the departing train at Saratoga may have a different reason for going, bat no one can give the climate as that reason. If he should, he would have to give the same reason for leaving the planet, which, indeed, may well be done. Perhaps this round globe, small or large, as you please, is not perfect in climate, and was not intended to be, #nd, perhaps, the conditions of human life with which it furnishes its inhabitants are by no means all they should be. What we maintain is that, con- sidering the planet upon which we are obliged to revolve, from no fault or option of our own, the climate of Saratoga Springs is for living in the year round unequalled, and this we say with so little malice for any and so much charity for all, that we advise them all to do as we did — my lady of Foot- hold and I — try it. What fact could be more conclusive for the Sara- toga climate and its eastern Plateau of clean sand than the fact that only one per cent of its inhab- itants die of consumption, while fifteen per cent of the population die of consumption in the State at large and twenty per cent in the city of New York ? The Saratoga Treatment is for all periods of time. You need not feel obliged to leave off drinking its THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 169 water just when it is beginning to benefit yon, or to cease breathing its air just as its invigorating effect is beginning to tell upon your dilapidated con- stitution, or return to the brawn-consuming sun of the sunny South just when you are collecting col- lops of fat on your flanks. Instead of three weeks at Carlsbad, three years at Saratoga ; instead of popping in and out at Schlangenbad or Nice, a repose in the bosom of your family, while the Treatment transforms the liver and transfigures the complexion. Some need one year, some two years, some five, some half a lifetime, some a whole lifetime of the Saratoga Treatment. You combine being at home with getting well. It is noteworthy that those who leave Saratoga for their old home or a new one almost invariably return. They miss the Saratoga Treatment. However in- different they may have been to it while under- going it, their system rebels against being deprived of it. All the more will they be awakened to a consciousness of its efficacy if they have been hitherto unconscious of its existence. The benefi- cence of the air of Saratoga is shown in the craving for it. The new-comers speak of a desire to be out-of- doors that they never felt anywhere else. The out- door air is so invigorating that the in-door air is correspondingly enervating — not that the latter is any worse than any other air of house or office, but that the former is so much better than that of the 170 SARATOGA CHIPS. continent generally. This is attributable to the remedial and renovating influence of the Climate Treatment when not counteracted by the furnace or the sewer. Ladies speak of getting rid of their sense of weariness and exhaustion by a walk or ride to an extent they never knew before. Sara- toga beguiles you out of doors, and that is the open-air annex of the Saratoga Treatment. The reason why the Greeks had such pretty noses and large brains is because they slept on their roofs in the open air, and walked up Mount Mac- Gregor, and looked out upon the valley of the Hud- son, and the Green Mountains, and our beautiful suburbs of Glens Falls, Schuylerville, and Mont- pelier. Mount MacGregor, with its comfortable hostelry, its Drexel cottage, where the great soldier fell in his last battle, and its magnificent panorama — Mount MacGregor will do for the happy bride and groom what Mount Ida did for Zeus and Hera, " . throw up her freshest herbs, while o'er them a bright golden cloud shall gather, and shed its drops of glistening dew." As Saratoga Springs is incomplete without Mount MacGregor, so the Saratoga Treatment will never do its perfect work if it does not comprise an in- timate acquaintance with the nooks and glens, strolls and scenes, of this charming mountain. Saratoga will alleviate the hay-fever, but Mount MacGregor will cure it. THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 173 This peculiarly invigorating effect of the Sara- toga atmosphere has been attributed to the mineral springs and the Adirondack Mountains. Certainly the climate has some of the peculiarities of a moun- tain region, and there is a snap and substance in its air that may well suggest the influence of the ocean as it bubbles up in a score of places, to add its saline zest to the waves of invigorating atmosphere that come down from the Kayaderosseras range. Let the theory be, then, that the Saratoga climate is a combination — unknown elsewhere — of salt air from the sea by way of the springs and mountain air from the Adirondacks. It is a climate with a wonderful average. It has its fits, and starts, and fluctuations, but compare it with any other, and it will average more satis- factory days and nights, noons, and morns, and evenings, than any other that we have found, my lady and 1, in our wanderings over the States at home or the lands abroad. There are more pleasant days in the three hun- dred and sixty-five at Saratoga than anywhere else, and I have been almost everywhere else. I have known three hundred of them to be pleasant. The remaining sixty-five bring the rains, but for which the wells and the cows would go dry. They include the uncomfortably hot days, but if it were not for these the peaches of New Jersey would not ripen, and the cheese of western New York would fail, 174 SARATOGA CHIPS. and the flocks would be cut off from the stalls in Pennsylvania. The days of the mornings below zero are in those sixty- five, but if they failed us, the malaria brought here by the ever- welcome Cur-guest would survive the winter and spread in the spring. So much has this cosmopolitan humanitarium to do in the way of restoring the malarious and setting up the broken- down, that it would have to succumb to the maladies it cures but for the Winter Cure, which it applies .to itself as well as practises upon its visitors. With more visitors than any other Spa under the sun, Saratoga has never been visited by an epidemic, a cyclone, a water-spout, or an earthquake, although it has felt and I have felt the vibrations of the one intended to admonish the politicians of Washing- ton and the Government of New York. In 1832 the cholera that scourged Montreal, Al- bany, Plattsburg, Burlington, Whitehall, and the towns of the Hudson left Saratoga untouched. Never was the village more healthful or beautiful than it was during that awful summer. This not because the wicked are so few or their " jobs" so modest, but because there are so many enduring tax-payers here waiting patiently for a seasonable op- portunity, which is absolutely sure to come. The exemption of Saratoga from the cholera was doubtless owing to that peculiar ingredient of its atmosphere, which gives it its pre-eminence as a cli- mate, ozone, which is a kind of electrified oxygen. THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 177 A great deficiency in ozone has been noted and re- ported at places where the cholera was most destruc- tive. The ozone of the Saratoga air is a preventive as well as a restorative. Here you may inhale the ounce of prevention in the air, as well as imbibe the pound of cure in chloride of sodium. By the way, does the incipient consumptive know how to breathe ? Does she know the art of inhaling this bracing and toning ozone ? Does she breathe with the bottom as well as the top of her lungs, which are perishing for lack of use and ex- ercise ? Consumption has been stopped and the lungs restored to absolute health and soundness by first having the air of the Saratoga Plateau to breathe, and then learning how to fill, and expand, and exercise every portion of the lungs with it. The art of breathing is the secret of living with many a person with an inherited tendency to consumption. Ask your physician for a lesson in breathing. It may save your life. The Saratoga Treatment then consists, first of all and most of all, in having a home and being at home at Saratoga. In accordance with that theory, it has entered upon a new era in home-life. It is a home boom. The new houses are not simply cot- tages, a cross between a tree and a tent, designed only to keep off the sun at noon and the rain at night — they are homes. They are built for all the year round, and they will sooner or later be oc- cupied all the year round. 178 SARATOGA CHIPS. Not only does the Saratoga Treatment excel that of all other mineral- water resorts in having a Win- ter Cnre attachment and enabling the Cur-guest to get well at home, it makes that home a paying investment. While recuperating his kidneys he replenishes his purse. Besides the advantages of climate, location, and re- fined society, he has the opportunity of making money out of his house and lot investment. It is salable and rentable, or it enables its owner to utilize the summer boarder or the jolly tobogganer. If you prefer not to feed him, you can room him, and turn him out to browse on your neighbor's pasture. An income in hard cash of from two hundred dollars to one thousand dollars per annum for rooms alone is not to be sneezed at or sneered at by those who wish to live without embarrass- ment and die out of debt. In no other place where the human carnivora congregate for health, rest, or recreation are there so many of the most deserving people in the world getting a good living or making a fortune out of a house and lot, where there is not enough of the lot to raise a hill of beans or a sitting of chickens. So that the Saratoga Treatment falls in with the fact that the chief end of living is to live in a home of your own. It enables you to keep up an identi- ty in your own estimation and an individuality in the estimation of your fellows. It confers a sense of being somebody upon the veriest nobody. A THE SARATOGA TREATMENT. 179 workingman who owns the roof over him and the mattress under him feels superior to the dude in kids who boards. If you can afford it, build yourself a palace on the beautiful North Broadway, of course ; but if your bank account is inadequate for that, you will not have far to go toward the west, the south, or the east before finding a desirable spot for this home of your own, which constitutes so important a factor in The Saratoga Treatment. A CRACK SHOT. FLYING CHIPS. This year eighteen hundred and eighty- seven is clearly the centen- nial year of Saratoga Springs. In 1787 the copper- colored may be said to have faded into the pale-faced American. The Al- gonquin with his bow and arrow gave way to the Anglo-Saxon with his ramrod and mutton-chop whiskers. That was the year of the first cottage, the first hotel, and the first Cur-guest — according to our in- dustrious village historian, N. B. Sylvester. The name Saratoga seems to have settled into its present spelling and euphony and fastened itself upon the springs in 1772. This first hotel, the nebula out of which has been evolved the present constellation of hostelries, was kept, and kept " clean," and kept open all the year round, and its proprietor, Alexander Bryan, is de- servedly rewarded with an epitaph in Greenridge, which is not all epitaphy. He was the first Cur- 182 SARATOGA CHIPS. guest at Saratoga and the first illustration of what its waters and its winters can do to promote health and prolong life, for he lived on snow-shoes and chloride of sodium to the good old age of ninety- two. It is plain, therefore, that the year 1887 is the year for a centennial celebration at Saratoga Springs, especially as it closes with the Saratoga of the Phil- istines and opens with the Saratoga of the Children of Light. Of course, as would be expect- ed, the Sarato- gas are divided into Philistines and the Children of Light. The Philistines have so long prevailed at Saratoga Springs that they have nearly extirpated its esprit de corps, which the Children of Light are now striving valiantly to revive and utilize. The Philistines have been slack in possessing the land, but now the Children of Light are rapidly making North Broadway an avenue of palaces and covering the eastern Plateau with the beautiful homes of an intelligent and public-spirited people. RESIDENCE OE 3. P. GILSON, ESQ. FLYING CHIPS. 183 The Philistines do not like to be disturbed in the enjoyment of the trance that they share with the frogs. The frogs, however, are up and croaking for eight months of the year, and are silent for the remaining four, while the Philistines lie down, curl up, and croak for the whole year round. They are in a perpetual state of objection. They demur at the expense and the commotion that attend public enterprise. They are startled out of their slumber in broad day by the shrieks of the merry sleighers. They prefer the old, long funereal silence that reigned over Union Avenue and still reigns over Greenridge. They even prefer the old prices of real estate, which would not sell even at those prices. The Philistines' inertia is easily explained. It is the natural and useful conservatism that counter- acts by one extreme the perils of another. So that charity for the Saratoga Philistine, with his vexa- tious partiality for the good old times of Rip Van Dam, suffereth long and is kind. He will awake one of these days, and fall in and keep step, and endure patiently the melody of the band and the melodious noises of the boys, and even pay for keeping the streets sprinkled and the snow smooth, when he finds that the march across the Plateau enhances the value of his house and lot and brings customers to his store. Strikes and rumors of strikes, dull markets, and slow blood in the veins of trade have no effect 184 SARATOGA CHIPS. upon Saratoga. Capital here replies to all menaces, " Then I won't build," and labor knows that nothing is to be gained here by refusing to build houses, because nothing is to be gained here unless houses are built and hotels run. Furthermore, if every workingman in town should leave town, his place would be filled before he got to the next town. It is the natural home of both capital and labor. Both thrive, and neither can afford to bull- doze the other. Saratoga is secure. Speaking of the aqueous freaks of nature, a friend from Texas tells me, as we enjoy the Saratoga sum- mer evening on the piazza, of an eruption of water at San Marco, that is as curious and mysterious in its origin as any of our mineral springs. It is the San Marco River, which comes up bang right out of the ground without saying, " By your leave" to any other river or to any natural law which gov- erns the entrance or exit of terrestrial streams. There is no more sign of water above its source than there is in the Barcan Desert, and it springs from the bosom of the solid earth a navigable water- course, clear as crystal, limestone in nature, in some places thirty feet deep, with vegetation at its bottom that resembles coral, and thus flows on until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It is admirably adapted to mill purposes, and hence an invaluable acquisition to the enterprising San Marcons. Pro- fessor Gray, of Harvard, who made the river a FLYING CHIPS. 185 visit, said it was impossible to solve the enigma of its origin, but suggested that it might originate in the melting snows that sank into the ground at the feet of the Eockies, forming a subterranean stream that breaks through to the surface at San Marco. Saratoga is remarkable for the number and variety of its organizations, designed to keep its residents and visitors supplied with social enjoyments, edu- cational facilities, and eleemosynary opportunities. There are ten churches, which, with the organi- zations inside of them and outside of them, make seventy-seven organizations in all of a religious or reformatory character. Adding to these the lodges, orders, and the liter- ary, social, military, scientific, and winter sport associations, and the Saratogan, native, foreign, and occasional, may be said to have the opportunity of contributing to the support of one hundred and fif- teen organized endeavors to promote his highest in- terests. There are eight Public Schools, including one of the most efficient and satisfactory High Schools in the State, and five private schools, including St. Clement's College, recently established. Saratoga would be the place of all places for a Hospital for Curables. The Children of Light at Saratoga have laid the foundations of a temple to the goddess Athene, and 18G SARATOGA CHIPS. it cannot be long before the Philistines will join in the acclamations that announce the completion of the Saratoga Athenaeum. The reading-rooms, public libraries, and museums of the foreign resorts rival their colonnades and bath-tubs in splendor and convenience. Herein, again, Carlsbad has antiquity and the majority on its side. The tony Greeks and the sturdy Romans provided nutriment for the mind as well as crutches for the £ont. Athens had its Athenaeum as well as. its sanitarium. The Cur-guests divided their devotions between Hygeia and Athene. In Greece no bank account or interior decorations would com- pensate for ignorance of books and art. A health resort is at a statistical disadvantage. Its vital statistics contain those who come there to die. Those who come there for health bring no health with them, and must be supplied with it by the health resort. This is embarrassing as well as exhausting to the health resort. It is not credited with those whom it brings to life, and is discredited with those who die on its hands. A reason given for the Village form of govern- ment for Saratoga Springs is that its visitors are attracted by the simplicity and rusticity of the word Village. This is worthy of Miss Mercy Pecksniff, who sat upon a stool not by reason of the shortness of her FLYING CHIPS. 18? legs, but because she was all girlish ness and kitten- ish buoyancy. Saratoga Springs is the only community whose population ranges from twelve to fifty thousand that governs itself by means of trustees, from sheer girlishness and kittenish buoyancy ! Saratoga has been injured by the land leech. A foot-note to page 159 of Mr. Stone's interesting " Reminiscences of Saratoga" reads, " Joseph Bonaparte, failing to buy in Saratoga, afterward bought a beautiful place at Bordentown, N. J., on the Delaware River." This is more than a foot- note ; it is only too felicitous a heading for an un- welcome chapter in the history of Saratoga real estate. There should be a special and extra tax for the land leech. Land that is so valuable that it cannot be purchased should be taxed according to its owner's valuation. An occasional fast horse creates a street full of fast drivers, and then the brute is invariably at the butt end of the whip. A horse that in any other corporation of civiliza- tion, or even barbarism, would be allowed to go the speed that keeps his gait, at Saratoga Springs is pro- voked, harassed, and lashed into such confusion of head and embarrassment of legs that he has a gait for every leg. He paces with one, racks with an- other, shackles with another, gallops with a fourth, 188 SARATOGA CHIPS. and waltzes with all four. There are well-dressed people who drive on Union Avenue, who really seem to believe that a horse is going rapidly if he is only wriggling tremendously at the tail, sweating copiously at every pore, and has a different gait for every leg. There are more gaits known to the horse at Sara- toga Springs than at any other place on the face of the earth. Then the airs and attitudes of the gentleman who is trying to make you believe, and, perhaps, really be- lieves, that he is driving a fast horse, instead of his horse being driven by a fast man. How he leans back, how he holds hard on the lines (apparently), how intently he looks upon his horse, and what solicitude there is in his tones as he endeavors to soothe the furious beast, which is going at the rate of seventeen miles an hour, and would stop dead still if he were not afraid of the whip ! Pecksniff's horse he is, all action and no go, and makes up in motion what he lacks in locomotion. The livery drivers are noticeably careful of the faithful creatures under their lines, but the livery hirers, the tradesman's kid, and the lad on the ten- cent express ought not to be run away with, if there is any danger of breaking the horse's neck. It is sometimes said, "¥e would like to visit Saratoga, but cannot afford it ; the price of living is FLYING CHIPS. 189 too high, and there is too much exaction in the way of dress and show.'' There never was a complaint more destitute of reason or more out of keeping with the facts. While it is true, and ought to be true, that the Saratoga hotels and residences draw the wealthiest and most fashionable people in the world, it is, ought to be, and always will be equally true that there is no watering-place or place for living the year round where the resident or visitor, the workingman or the literary man, can live on less income than he can at Saratoga Springs. Nor is it true that you cannot secure a comfort- able home here unless you own a Western State or an Eastern Board of Aldermen. You can buy a house and lot, or you can buy a lot and build a house, in this wonderful climate and in the vicinity of these marvellous fountains of curing waters, for just as reasonable an amount of money as you can in places where there is no winter to expel the malaria of the poisonous summer from your blood. It is the glory of Saratoga Springs that ladies may walk its streets by daylight and gaslight unattended and unmolested. This is creditable to our civili- zation, which will never be what it should be until a woman may walk its streets by night or day with- out risk of injury or insult. And the men who 190 SARATOGA CHIPS. permit the insult are as cowardly as the villains who inflict it. The ancients had as few diseases as they had doc- tors, and when they came they (the diseases, of course) were accepted with resignation as punish- ment from the gods, and were to be got rid of by such sacrifices as would be likely to appease the dis- pleasure of the offended deities. The number of those who in this country resort to mineral water exclusively as a remedy are grad- ually increasing. Some of them know no other than Hunyadi Janos water, and whoever has found relief from it will kiss the bottle in grateful rapture every time thereafter that he pours out a dose. Some have no other remedy for biliousness, and in- digestion, and a sour temper. As it is not an agreeable beverage, it is not likely to become a con- stant one ; nevertheless, its efficacy is so marked, quick, and satisfactory in certain cases, that the in- toxicated Cur-guest is apt to resort to it too fre- quently. Proud flesh finds a remedy in mineral waters, especially in those of Barreges, and are therefore re- sorted to by those Americans of the United States whose flesh has suddenly broken out with this dis- ease, from no fault of their ancestors, who were poor but honest, and were in no danger of the malady, FLYING CHIPS. 191 because they were destitute of the money that brings it on. As acridity of temper comes of acidity at the stomach, the mineral water which cures the latter will remove the former. Indeed, it could have no better testimony than such a result as this. But do not expect any water to cure you of your sins. You may need the Hyssop Cure. The famous Bruce escaped from the bloodhounds by swimming the river. The noses of the dogs could not track him through the water. But no water, however impregnated with chlorides, or alkalies, or any other lies, can baffle the Xemesis that shadows you for defrauding the tax-payers or deceiving a woman. Alas ! that he can follow the trail through the cren- erations of those who would gladly get rid of it if they could, and deserve to get rid of it. The nearest I can come to a goddess of mineral springs is Yorvonna, who, we are told, was venerated by the Gauls for presiding over their baths, prob- ably because she prohibited gratuities and insisted upon wages. A votive tablet may be seen at Bourbonne-les- Bains, inscribed by C. Gatinius to the goddess Yorvonna, for the cure of his daughter Cocilla. Sewer gas seems to be synonymous with malaria, 192 SARATOGA CHIPS. and the two may be similar in nature and equal in malignancy, but they may have a different ori- gin. Your well water, or your stagnant pond, or your low river bottom, or the sluggish streams in the rock under your house in New York may breed the malarious fever that slowly saps your energies and poisons your blood, but there is only one definition of the fatal sewer gas, and that is gas generated by a sewer. No sewer, no sewer gas ; no sewer gas, no malarial mortality from that source. That closes the discussion of that question, and opens the ques- tion whether bad plumbing should not be classed with bad murder, and be made punishable with the same remedy. The plumbers have more power over life and death than the cowboys or the Sioux. If you must live over a rock, be sure that you are well informed about its pools and streams. Where ignorance is fatal it is wise to be enlightened. No chlorides, or iodides, or cures of any sort, no Saratoga climate or Carlsbad Treatment, will prevail against the pestilential effect of a wet cellar or of a defective or inadequate or unwisely located sewer. Here is where the penny- wise and pound -foolish policy is not simply foolish, but criminal. The tax-payer cannot afford to save his taxes at the expense of his real estate. Better drain the treasury and incur a debt to secure a perfect system of sewage than to pave streets and build homes over pipes that poison the air and destroy life. FLYING CHIPS. 193 It is said that a caravan of camels will walk around a broomstick and that a herd of elephants can be turned back by a fence-rail on the ground. Whether this is true or not it certainly is true that " a license to be drunk on the premises" will, if located with adequate recklessness, bring the march of civilization to a dead stop. For the mis- chief that it does to property, the property owner should easily win a suit for damages. Nothing should be more self-evident, then, one would think, to the average Saratogan than that his bread and butter depends upon the state and con- dition of the real estate market, whether he has an owner's interest in it or not. Furthermore, he should see that whatever in any way injures this market is a calamity, and whatever nourishes and promotes this market is a blessing to a place which is, as no other place is, the favorite of nature and the future. High prices at Saratoga are as necessary as low ones, since some are just as much disappointed in not being charged five dollars a day as others are in being charged more than one dollar a day. To charge them less would deprive them of their self- respect and us of their money, and the one is indis- pensable to their happiness and the other to ours. Five dollars a day is just as indispen sable as five dollars a week. 194 SARATOGA CHIPS. Saratoga, while it provides amply for the tastes and wants of the rich, is ingenious and generous without example in its opportunities for those who have not a fortune to spend in trying to save their lives and get a little pleasure out of life. You can see any day, as you stroll along under the elms of Saratoga, how Gothic architecture was sug- gested to Gothic architects. The branches of the elms reach over, and touch, and form the Gothic roof, while the trunks of the trees on either side create a vista of stalwart col- umns, all combining to make the street resemble the aisle of a vast cathedral. There are some very striking tree views in the streets of Saratoga. All the moralists, and satirists, and professors of hygienics take sides against us and themselves, too, in this marvellously plucky fight of man with his environment. They never seem to reflect when they upbraid us for. being so fast that we are slow, considering the fact that we are riding through space on the back of a meteor. When they chide us for our nervousness, they forget that we make an annual and a diurnal trip very well calculated to agitate the nerve centres, as well as the commercial centres. We might feel somewhat hysterical if we were going round the sun astraddle of Maud S. What, then, must be the hysteria engendered by a speed of one thousand miles a minute, and in the FLYING CHIPS. 195 meanwhile whirling on our axis fast enough to take away the breath of a tumbler pigeon. Does it never occur to our censors that the head- ache which they charge to our negligence may be attributable to this ride on the meteor ? May not the biliousness come of the meteors passing through a bilious spot of the atmospheric universe \ Yes, man is making a plucky fight of it, and " we will fight in the shade if the arrows of the barbarians darken the sun." THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. It is the large and sagacious object of these Chips to get Saratoga Springs looked at from all the points of view from which it can be seen to advan- tage — to get it intelligently and fully compre- hended. This will be as apparent as it will be in- structive to all who read all that is set down in these pages. Saratoga is many-sided. It has many ends to gain. It has a multifarious mission. It is the world's Cosmopolitan Spa. Those who do not look upon Saratoga Springs as the world's Cosmopolitan Spa, those who do not re- gard it as a place for everybody as distinguished from anybody, will criticise it unfairly and com- plain of it unjustly. They will see it through the refracting medium of their own prejudices, which, however sincere, may be very short-sighted. It is complained, for example, that Saratoga Springs "is a place of gayety, where the waters may be drank or let alone, according to one's fancy," and that some regard " the drinking of the mineral water in the light of a joke." Then, Saratoga is the very place for those who need the Gayety Cure and do not need the Mineral- Water Treatment, and there are enough of these 198 SARATOGA CHIPS. born every year to keep that temple of refined fun, the United States Hotel, full all the year round. As it is, it would be just as grave a calamity for that hotel to close its doors against the votaries of happiness and fashion as it would be for those pop- ular homes for the Cur-guest kept by Drs. Strong, Grant, and Hamilton to be closed against the devo- tees of Hygeia. A hostelry of this rank and in- fluence cannot be maintained without bene- ficently affect- ing the cause of remedial gayety. A cosmopo- litan Spa can- not be exclu- sively a sani- or an insani- tarium. If Saratoga is an asylum, it is a sane asylum. It is not for the sick alone or for cranks to the exclusion, of the level- headed. It is for the well as well as the well-to-do and the wealthy. It is designed to preserve the health of the healthy and to perpetuate the happi- ness of those who are already happy, not less than to relieve the spendthrift of his cash and the acidu- lous of their bile. RESIDENCE OF HON. C. S. LESTER. THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 201 Saratoga is as much more than Carlsbad as America is than beautiful Bohemia, and it would be as undesirable to make Saratoga over into a Carlsbad as it would be to reconstruct Carlsbad into a Saratoga. One Carlsbad is enough, and more than one Saratoga Springs would be more than enough for so small a star as that on which we ride. The Mineral- Water Treatment should be estab- lished and proclaimed at Saratoga, as I have else- where insisted, but it should not be made compul- sory along with education and vaccination — need not be. The Saratoga Treatment may or may not include chloride of sodium, since those who need the climate may simply have the blues from too long confinement at the desk, while those who need the minerals may be depressed by an hered- itary enlargement of the abdomen. The Saratoga Gayety Cure is to be recommended to those dead-in-earnest countrymen of ours who meet here periodically to set the world to rights. It would counteract the intensity which gives them a lean and hungry look, and makes them think too much, and prevents their sleeping well at night. Such men are dangerous — to themselves ! Instead of brawn they have choler, instead of sweetness and light, a sour way of looking out upon the world, and instead of well-set hair, baldness. What terriers they are, these setters of the world to rights ! They have the thin nose of the black- and-tan and the glittering eye of the ferret. Their 202 SARATOGA CHIPS. long experience and wonderful skill in hunting the rats out of education and society has got into their visage, gait, and gestures. Their eyes snap, their mouths drop open, their hats slip up from their foreheads, and their feet fly from under them as they walk, or rather as they hop, skip, and jump from one meeting to another and from committee to committee, and boast of being " so driven" that they have " no time to eat." They have time enough to eat, but not to chew. They bolt their food, and when it lodges in their guzzle they wash it down with iced water in gulps, a gobletful at a gulp. And yet they know, or ought to know, that no world as thickly settled as this one was ever set right while its digestive apparatus was out of repair and its intensity was so morbid that it could bite in two a tenpenny nail. He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat, he that putteth his trust in his logical acumen shall be made lean. He should fly to " the place for gayety," and try the Gayety Cure, and rather than have no fun, let him drink the waters for fun. If the waters prove inoffensive, perhaps the fun will be of service, or possibly the fun will be the very constituent of the dose that will make it efficacious. The Carlsbad Treatment is good for the American terrier, who is so given to hunting and shaking rats that he hunts them in his sleep and shakes them in his dreams. We should miss them, and should THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 203 long for their return, but Carlsbad would be good for them. Carlsbad does not profess to set the world to rights, and yet it does set the world to rights by repairing its digestive clock-work and clothing its reformers in their right minds. Carls- bad knows nothing of conventions, or resolutions, or discussions. It has no use for even a Whereas. It cannot be beguiled into a debate on temperance — simply takes it for granted — or a dispute over forms of government — simply insisting upon self- government. The intensity of the terrier finding no one to dis- pute his positions or question his panacea for setting the world to rights finally and quietly succumbs to the mild sceptre of the goddess Ilygeia, and feels his consuming earnestness saving place to a recruiting sense of acquiescence in the government of the universe. I was positively alarmed during my Treatment at Carlsbad lest this sudden reaction from the din and racket over the tariff and civil service reform should work injuriously upon my wearied eerehj- lum; but presently I began to feel the absence of the setters of the world to rights to be recupera- tive, and soon began to realize that as the world had got on without me before I came into it, the world would probably get on without me after I had gone out of it. Finally, Reason crawled up the steps of her long-forsaken throne, and I sank into a state of beatific coma, from which I did not relapse until I 204 SARATOGA CHIPS. was once more startled by the head-lines of the ISTew York paper brought by the pilot. Care killed a cat, and it will kill a Cur-guest, if he doesn't let the world wag occasionally and give it, and him- self, and us a rest. The most restful bath I ever took was at Wies- baden, because I read over my tub the inscription taken from the baths of Antoninus : " Thou shouldst come hither free from care, if thou wouldst depart healed of disease, for here the careless alone are healed." I. prescribe a bath in that sentiment for the ter- rier who, in his intensity to set the world to rights, has set himself to wrongs. True enough, Saratoga is the very place for con- ventions. There is no such place for conventions designed to set the world to rights, whether it be the world here or the world hereafter ; but Sara- toga is the place for vacations as well as conven- tions, and for those who can combine the two. The Cosmopolitan Spa is the place for everything and everybody. There is no vitalized air like that of Saratoga for the morbid earnestness to flee to, nor for any one to flee to who has little health, and less money, and a temper out of gear ; but Saratoga, with all its kindly summer skies above, its friendly earth be- neath, and its healing waters under the earth, can- not restore or recruit the reason of the terrier who will continue to hunt rats, even in the hotel piazza, THE SARATOGA GAYETY CURE. 205 or in the shade of the parks, or at the bottom of his glass of bicarbonate of baryta. What, for example, could be better calculated to rest the brain and recruit the nerves of the terrier than a Saratoga Garden Party ? The spectacle at the Grand Union during one of these festivals of an evening, when the fountains glitter in their colored lights and the colossal elms reach out their sheltering arms over the merry throng, is not excelled at any European spa. Of course, it has its Thackerian point of view, for, of course, the hod-carrier's son asked the pea- nut-vendor's daughter whether she did not think it was " rawther a mixed crowd, you know ;" and, of course, Mr. de Dude, whose father struck oil in '80, asked Mademoiselle von Nude whether it did not look to her like " somewhat of a miscellaneous as- sortment." Of course, when the old lady's unpro- tected shoulders shivered in the bracing evening air of the Saratoga summer, her old bear must have his ancient jest at her expense. "Cold, my dear?" " Yes ; what shall I do to get warm ?" "I'll tell you what to do." "What?" " Put on another bracelet !" Of course, the churls must have their sneers, but the satirist's way is not the only way of looking at the evolution of human plumage. The Garden Party has its uses. It is, like all occasions when 206 SARATOGA CHIPS. society is in session, a school of manners, a camp for social discipline, a gallery of beautiful faces and unsophisticated busts, and a choice display in the art of competitive millinery. It is an exceptional exhibition in the " fleeting show," showing the best that can be done by the world's great democracy in breeding and dressing, in grace of movement and conversational vocabulary, in the thousand little artifices and arts that lower our voices, conceal our claws, and turn up the corners of our mouths. The Garden Party cuts straight across the grain of the dead-in-earnestness of our setters of the world to rights. It polishes the rich, gives employment to the poor, promotes trade, and opens new opportuni- ties for the cunning fingers and the industrious loom. The Saratoga Gayety Cure is accessible to the terrier and Cur- guest. He may not be financially or even physically able to compass Carlsbad, and even if he is, it will only be a brief makeshift, while Saratoga may be to him not simply a tempo- rary resort for a transient convalescence, but a per- manent home, where his health will be secure. For the very best thing the terrier who is digging his grave with his digging for rats can do for him- self and for the world out of joint, is to build a kennel for himself on the sunny western hills that command the Adirondacks or out on the top of the eastern Plateau, where he may reconsider his in- tensity and allay the hot passion of his distempered blood. THE SARATOGA GAYETY CUKE. 207 He shall go and sit and hear the bands play and see the diamonds sparkle, or he may from " the loopholes of retreat peep at the great Babel," and " not feel the crowd." He shall choose between the Gayety Cure and the Rest Cure, or he may combine the two, which he can do at the Cosmo- politan Spa as he can do nowhere else. Then shall the intensity which is eating as doth a cancer, because it is a cancer in the mind, give place to a serenity which will cause his temper to sweeten, his gait to slacken, his muscle to accumu- late, and his health to spring forth speedily. Sara- toga shall be to him as it has been to me, and will be to many yet, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. CHIPS AND WAFERS. By a poetical coincidence, sufficient of itself to justify these Chips and "Wafers, the wound of the Emperor Charles IV., which he received at the battle of Crecy, was healed by the waters of Carls- bad in 1358, and the wound of Major-General William Johnson, Bart., which he received at the battle of Lake George, was healed by the waters of Saratoga in 1767. Here's to the memory of the monarch, and the knight, and to the prosperity of these two healing waters, and to the health of those who are seeking it at either of them ! The Drug Cure has no friends in Germany. Mineral water is used by the German doctors to counteract the diseases caused by medicine. The waters of Luchon are prescribed for those who have been injured by the mercury and calomel pre- scriptions of their family physicians. When Sir Walter Scott's Uncle Thomas was dying, at ninety years of age, they put medicine into his mouth, and he spat it into his handkerchief, say- ing, "I have lived without drugs, and I shall die 210 SARATOGA CHIPS. without them." The sensible and classical Celsus said, " The best medicine is to take no medicine." I came into the world just as castor-oil was going out of it — as a medicine. It required seven adults to accomplish the castor-oil treatment, although I was only about seven years of age. There was one at each leg, one at each arm, one with my head in his hands, one to steady the funnel in my mouth, and one to pour in the oil. But when they let me up, I let up the cas- tor-oil, and it has been up ever since. Now, cas- tor-oil is used as a hair-oil, after it has been per- fumed, and the invalid infants are taken to the fountains of chloride of sodium. RESIDENCE OF DR. B. M. KENDALL. Do not be disheartened if the hrst results of min- eral waters are disheartening. I drank them one year, and was about to abandon them when the relief came. In cases where the water ultimately works a per- CHIPS AND WAFERS. 211 manent cure, the first results are the opposite of those intended. Gastralgia is often aggravated be- fore it is cured by mineral water. A New York American tells rne that he has re- duced the art of living to something fine and clever. His home is in New York. lie spends his summers in Switzerland and his winters in the south of France. He occasionally stops over night in his palaces on Fifth Avenue and the Hudson. The American Croesus and the European sovereign re- semble the founder of Christianity in one respect at least — they do not know where to lay their head. He, however, because He had no place in which to lay it ; they because they have so many places pro- vided that they do not know which to choose. The donkey starves to death half way between the two stacks of hay. So rich is he in hay that he perishes for the want of it. There is nothing to choose in the way of discontent between those who amass a great property and those who amass a great poverty. It is an educational fallacy that information, es- pecially if it is " classical," guarantees efficiency. One man may have every kind of knowledge and no knack for utilizing it, while another may know nothing whatever except how to do one thing. There can be no doubt as to which of these men will succeed. Nor is the knack of the one any 212 SARATOGA CHIPS. more to his credit than the want of it in the other a discredit. The successful may succeed in everything except recitation, and those who fail in life may never have failed in class. Some are quick to learn every les- son except their lesson in school, while others learn all the lessons in school and no lessons in life. Such is the fascination that the morbid biped feels for the methods devised and remedies in- vented for his benefit, that he becomes vexed and rebellious when he finds that he is not sufficiently disordered to try them all. It is an intolerable dep- rivation to be denied the use of a remedy. With what a supercilious air the traveller who has just obtained a bit of information dispenses it in answer to a question of a fellow-traveller, " And you never knew that ! Well, you are an ignoramus !" When George Washington asked Tom Conner the way to the High Rock Spring, Tom, not know- ing to whom he was speaking, rounded off his di- rections with, " Any darned fool ought to know the way. ' ' The railway-faring man, though a fool, may pos- sibly know all about the connections of his train, while the passenger, with the talents of an angel, may be ignorant of the information that he needs. How contemptuously he may be answered by the CHIPS AND WAFERS. 213 brakeman ; but, then, he reciprocates the brake- man's sneer when the brakeman asks him the meaning of " St. Paul preferred" or " bulls and bears." We are all passengers, one knowing some things, another some other things, and none knowing all things — a fact which should make us kindly consid- erate one toward another. A portion of our happiness, at least, should be in promoting that of our fellows. Many an American of the United States species generates enough steam to run six businesses as large as his own, but does not save enough of it to carry on the one he has in hand. It escapes into the air instead of through the pipes. He spurts and wastes. Poor fellow ! there is little help for him in a climate so productive of spurts and wastes. A Long Island steamer captain said of his boat, " She won't hold her steam, sir ! If she would only hold her steam she would be the fastest boat on the Sound." ; . The American of the United States species is the fastest civilization on the globe, but he won't hold his steam, he will spurt, and must burst, and then he may be thankful that he can lay up at Saratoga for repairs. He might be even faster in the end if he would hold his steam at the beginning. The more haste the less health and the greater the number of wrecks 214 SARATOGA CHIPS. in Washington and Wall Street. When Jerusalem shall become too fast, the Lord shall send among the fat ones leanness. Dearly beloved, don't try too hard to get well. The effort to secure health is often detrimental to it. It cultivates apprehension, stimulates nervous- ness, which, in turn, counteracts the effect of the remedy, and, what is worse, interferes with diges- tion. jSpeaking of moderation as a treatment, will not our venerated Mamma Dame Nature be good enough to set us the example ? She might turn off the draft from her " central fires," and give orders to Boreas to keep his cyclones to himself and the Rocky Mountains, and cultivate more uniformity in the thermometer. Good company is a factor in any Treatment. Lone- liness may counteract the effect of the most effec- tive remedy. Home-sickness is a powerful ally of every other sickness, and may even be the cause of any other. It is, therefore, all important that the vitiated American who goes so far from home as Carlsbad, in Bohemia, for his health, or the vitiated Dutchman who goes so far from home as Saratoga, in America, to recruit his wasted tissues, should have congenial companions, with whom he can ex- change cheerful opinions on the outcome of the battle. CHIPS AND WAFERS. 215 Man has developed and developed until he has become the Cur-guest of the animal creation. He has health to search for, while all the other ani- mals have only food and shelter to secure. What a saving of time and brawn for the animals below us to have no clothes to provide, or health to restore, or insoluble problems to solve ! When we are a little ill or down, it is he of the scythe and the hour-glass scratching us with the scythe, and when we recover we part with him with a mixture of relief and apprehension, for we know that he will soon return and show us by his glass that our sands have run out, and then cut us down once for all with his scythe. Death has become so fashionable that I am culti- vating a liking for it myself. Nor should we complain of the suddenness of our taking off. I am quite enamoured of that form of euthanasia. The suddener the better. It is the only compen- sation for being in the enemy's country, with ad- vance impossible and retreat cut off. It is best not to know that you have left this world until you find yourself in another ! Yes, there is just one other compensation for falling in this enemy's country, he is our last enemy. It is not at all likely that human life would be of satisfactory length to us, no matter how long it might be extended. Jacob called the days of the 216 SARATOGA CHIPS. years of his pilgrimage few and evil, although they were one hundred and thirty years, because he had not attained unto the days of the years of the life of his fathers. Gough's death was as glorious as his life was use- ful. He died at the right time in the right way. He went down with colors flying and every faculty at its post fighting for dear life. Gough's career sets at defiance the whole army of arguments for the system of education by recitation. He never crammed for an examination in trigo- nometry, or recited a lesson in synecdoche, or com- mitted to memory the emphasis of Hamlet's solil- oquy, or acquired the gesticulation of quinces, pota- toes, and watermelons. I once said to him, " You ought to be, as you de- serve to be, a rich man." " Yes," he replied, " I would be but for my credulity. You have no idea how many people there are in the world who promise to pay me just as soon as they get out of my sight." Like Wendell Phillips, he believed in every man who had a tear in his eye, or a silver mine in Mexico. If you are suffering from " overwork," stop overworking, but do not be overmuch afraid of overmuch work. You might have a worse epitaph than " overworked. " One who died of overwork at forty- eight said, in answer to remonstrance, " I CHIPS AND WAFERS. 217 would not lose the ends of living for the sake of life." Life is hardly worth living if we have to stop living in order to keep alive. Better die in the ranks fighting than on furlough resting, es- pecially if your malady is not overwork, but over- indulgence. " The end of work is to enjoy leisure," said Aristotle, but, alas ! the effect of work is to make leisure the harder work of the two. We might as well make up our mind to it, the harder we work, the better work we do, and the sooner we die. We can do no good fighting without ex- posure to the masked battery and the ambuscade. There is no better evidence of the fact that the battle of life is fought in the enemy's country. We cannot know his plan of campaign, and hence can have none of our own. It is not simply the treadmill of our occupation that wears us out and compels us to lay up at Sar- atoga or Carlsbad for repairs, it is the perplexities that are inseparable from our business or profes- sion. It is the tangles that we find it so easy to get into and so difficult to get out of. An eminent physician tells me how, when per- plexed over a new complication of diseases, he will walk the floor of his chamber at night, thinking in- tensely, until the solution flashes upon him at the height of his strain — the hardest strain the human mind has to bear. 218 SARATOGA CHIPS. Here comes in that inexplicable and awful law of self-sacrifice. The highest reaches in discovery and attainment are made in these moments of perplexity and apprehension which upset the nervous system and break the mental machinery. Darwin's industry was suicidal. The relentless law followed the Beagle round the world, and never left its victim until it left him in his grave. M. Louis Langue is not only in favor of the sur- vival of the fittest, but he insists that nature should not be thwarted in her endeavor to weed out those who are unfit to survive in the struggle for exist- ence. The Spartans were quite right, he says, in despatching their deformed offspring, and we should follow their example, and do away with drugs, hos- pitals, and the learned faculty. Coddling the dis- eased has diseased the race, until there is now scarcely a member of the human family, except among the barbarians, who is not obliged to seek restoration in the waters and the climate of Saratoga Springs. The dying are to be allowed to die and the feeble to go to the wall, and in a few generations only the sound constitutions would survive. Professor Francis Newman is an advocate of eu- thanasia, which is only another name for the trans- lation of those of us who are a burden to the rest of us. He would not allow tender kinsfolk to sacrifice youthful health, in order to add days or weeks to life after it is worn out. He would CHIPS AND WAFERS. 219 have commissioners who visit lunatic asylums called upon authoritatively for their sincere opinions on the subject of euthanasia. One might be very sincerely of the opinion that the world would be better off if all its lunatics were well out of it, and, nevertheless, have an equally sin- cere aversion to going about among them clapping a chloroform sponge to their noses. Luck consists as much in having the qualifica- tions for doing a thing as in inheriting the money which enables you to acquire it. You are lucky enough to know how to keep accounts, to manage a manufactory, or to make " everything you touch turn to gold." " It takes more to make a rich man now than it did formerly." Nonsense ! Any man is rich who has a roof over his head and income enough to pay his bills and taxes. He is the man to snap his fingers at the de- preciation of securities and the fluctuations in trade. It is curious that a man's strong point will be his ruin. That is because he presumes upon it and ex- poses it to attack once too often. The wide-awake are caught napping at last, the cunning fail from lack of cunning when the pinch comes, the witty are at their wits 1 end in the emer- gency, the wise make fools of themselves just when 220 SARATOGA CHIPS. their wisdom is most needed, the discreet speak unadvisedly with their lips at the critical moment, the politician is impolitic where adroitness would have saved him, Napoleon was outgeneralled. They are all over- conceited, and crowd their luck. Jackson killed the best marksman in Tennessee with a weapon of the marksman's own choosing. It was luck's first attempt and the first failure of skill. Old Hickory proved his character by never gambling after his first win at the table. If you make a fortune by your venture, never venture again. When the rule of the Golden Rule comes in, no man will run out on four legs at every passing pedestrian or carriage, at the peril of broken bones or a murder, and a suit at law against the tax -payers. Nor will he sit on his haunches, lift up his nose, and bark all night long, and keep awake the weary and drive the sick distracted. It would be well for those to whom Providence has entrusted the care of a dog to teach themselves how to behave them- selves. For if the master behaves properly, his dog may. It is difficult to keep both the Golden Rule and a dog. A laborer's dog flew out at me. If I had killed him with my stick, I would have been clubbed or my chickens would have been poisoned. What with the upper millstone of capital and the nether millstone of labor, we who are neither cap- italists nor "laborers" are ground up. Labor can CHIPS AND WAFEES. 223 strike, and capital can strike back, but we are power- less. The setters of the world to rights tell us that the business depression is caused by over-production. My Austrian friend, who has looked the whole matter over and under and through and through, is quite sure there are more boots and trousers, bread and watches, false teeth and petticoats, manu- factured than the human family requires or desires. How can that be, if one third of the human race are down with pneumonia for lack of trousers, and another third are at their last gasp because they are at their last loaf, while there is bread enough, and to spare, and to waste on Manhattan Island and the Queen's table ? The Texan is famishing for the wheat which in Minnesota is a drug, and the girls of Kamtchatka must let their hair hang from a defi- ciency in hair-pins which are manufactured in Con- necticut. The malarious Peruvian hears with de- spairing envy of the invigorating snow which his fellow-beings of Saratoga would gladly share with him. if he could. And yet, forsooth, business is de- pressed and the commercial world distraught be- cause too much wheat is grown and too many hair- pins are manufactured ! Is it over-production, or under-transportation, or both, or neither ? Or is there an ebb and flow of trade as inexplicable as the ebb and flow of the tides or the rise and fall of the aurora borealis ? 224 SARATOGA CHIPS. Anybody can give an explanation for anything, but who can explain the explanation ? The fall of the apple is caused by the attraction of gravitation, but what is the attraction of gravitation ? Does it never occur to the jaunty setter of this world to rights that if he has found the solution of one of these riddles he has discovered the key that un- locks them all ? If by over-production, or over-crowding, or ab- senteeism, or individual ownership in land we could account for financial calamities and commercial dis^ tress, we would have a solution of the enigma of human life, in the presence of which the profound- est intellect stands silent and appalled. The most literal Spa of the " Season" description is Barreges, in the Pyrenees, where the dilapidated fashionables live in barracks which are put up in the spring and taken down in the autumn. This falls in well with the migratory nature of the genus Cur-guest. Eestlessness is one of his diseases, and he expects to cure it by indulging it. The difference between American and European prices is easily exaggerated. Even higher than New York prices are paid in Paris by the American from the United States, who whips out his purse because he has made up his mind that " everything is so much cheaper here than it is at home." He swallows every hook thrown by the wily CHIPS AND WAFERS. 225 shopkeeper, however transparently covered with alluring bait. The price was doubled on the spot and before his eyes, but his eyes were holden by that eccentric freak of avarice that buys an article because it is cheap. Besides, it was "new," it was " just out," and "just beginning to be the rage," and was found afterward to have been the Christmas gift of a year before. The American from the United States (and a wealthy one at that) who boasts of living in Dres- den or Frankfort for a thousand dollars a year for- gets that many a New Englander has brought up a family of seven in the fear of the Lord on rive hun- dred dollars a year. Clothing is very much cheaper in London than in New York, but the New York tailor gives you a satisfactory fit, and the consequence is that his coat outlasts that with which you ran the blockade at the Custom House. You cannot wear out a garment that you dislike, while one that you are fond of lasts forever and a day. Nothing is cheap that is un- satisfactory. The spendthrift American from the United States is revolutionizing the prices faster than the polities of Europe. Every waiter knows him and grins at his approach, while the landlord uncovers and bends as low as he would to the Sultan or the Czar. But the Sultan or the Czar would probably knock him 226 SARATOGA CHIPS. over, while the American from the United States is tickled out of his wits and franks by the mercenary obeisances. His gratuities to the servants make them gratuitously insolent to his poor devil of a countryman who has earned his guldens by the sweat of his own instead of his father's brow. The less the American who travels for informa- tion or health identifies himself with his fellow- citizens of the spendthrift species, the better for his purse and temper. Here is where a knowledge of the language tells. It gives him opportunities for economy and observation. He may put up at inns which Scattermoney has not demoralized. He may leave the beaten tracks of travel, and will find his gain in doing so, if he wishes to study the people, digest what he sees, and give himself a rest from the faces, voices, and opin- ions of his native village. In Carlsbad I paid five cents for a shave by going where the American from the United States is never to be seen, ten cents for a hair-cut, and two dollars and forty cents for a half- day's drive. In Saratoga you may get as well shaved for ten cents as you can for twenty-five, and your hair as well cut for twenty-five cents as for fifty, and your half-day's drive will cost you from two to ten dol- lars, according to your knowing how to secure it. It is an interesting incident of civilization that a CHIPS AND WAFEBS. 227 war is going on all over the world between wages and gratuities, with the chances growing in favor of gratuities. Hotels that have taken the side of the wage system have been obliged to surrender, porter, waiter, boots, and all, to the system of gra- tuities. Europe, the Europe of Charlemagne and Bis- marck, charges you for the candle, but throws in a boot-jack. I tumbled over the boot-jack as soon as I had snuffed out the tallow dip. The European porter in full regimentals might be mistaken for a United States major-general fight- ing the Indians, whereas he is the major-general savage himself, whom we have to fight to save our scalps. The working-classes of England are, to use the familiar phrase of that land of endowed monarchy, " supported by voluntary contributions." The English laborer is expected to subsist upon them without growling about them. The amount of ''voluntary contributions' ' re- ceived by one for the support of st self, wife, and six children was eleven shillings a week. Yery often he had to keep his little ones on one and a half pence a day." Another "earned nine shil- lings a week, but since he has been a miller, and worked Sundays, he got twelve shillings a week." His wife says it " had often gone to her heart when she had only a bit of bread with nothing on it to 228 SAEATOGA CHIPS. part among the children." Another says, " When a master offered me a shilling a day, I asked him if he wanted to make a rogne of me ; for I couldn't live honest on that money. " And why not be a rogue, since he would be allowed twice as much in the county jail as he receives from his employer ? If there is anything the State seems to prefer to punishing criminals, it is the manufacture of them. Surely the amounts received by these people will not be dignified by the honorable name of " wages," any more than their dwellings, described in the " Report of Commissioners " as a " disgrace to a Christian community, ' ' should be designated by the hallowed word "home." Nor can these people be called working men and women in any sense which may be regarded as creditable to a u Christian com- munity. ' ' We exult over the cheapness of the article or the lowness of the wage, and found an institution to support by our gratuities those who cannot be sup- ported by the wages that we give them. If justice prevailed, mercy might be dispensed with. The United States of America is following rapidly in the footsteps of " the European plan," and we shall soon all be compelled to dance attendance to the music of the continental tip. Whatever be the result of the struggle, the fact will remain that the system of fair wages is better CHIPS AND WAFERS. 229 than unsystematic gratuities, and the keeping of the Golden Rule is always to be preferred to " support by voluntary contributions." Hygeia is wise in making much of music. All the animals are fond of it, man is particularly par- tial to it. He cannot walk through a dark woods without whistling. But perhaps he resorts to all music to keep his courage up and to get it up. We worship, fight, and dance to music, and are con- soled at dying with the hope of being escorted to the cemetery by a brass band playing the same march that led the funeral procession of the Iron Duke. At Kissingen the band passes under the windows in full blast at 5 a.m., calling the Cur-guest to his morning devotions at the shrine of Hygeia and her healing springs. A baker's dozen of brass bands may be heard at the same moment by any ear for music on any afternoon of August. The naming of a new town ought to be at- tended with as much thought and forethought as the naming of a baby, but it is not. It is de- spatched with thoughtless haste or with the same imitative thoughtlessness that gives a score of towns the same name. One would suppose that the vanity of the Ameri- can of the United States, who is so boastful of the self-reliance of his country, would suggest a 230 SARATOGA CHIPS. little self reliance and a little originality in the naming of his towns and springs. A spring with a name in plain English, that had an easy and obvious meaning, might make a for- tune for its owner by the name alone. Penticosta, France, is, so far as I now know, the only place where the springs are named after the organ they profess to benefit. One is called " Sources of the Liver," a second, " Skin," a third, " Stomach." This is common-sense, how- ever commonplace, and suggests one name for a spring which would be a hit in the way of novelty and perspicacity — Liver "Water ! I think of such names as Atonic Spring, Atrophy Waters, Cachexia Elixir, or these : Herpes, Ec- zema, Dyspepsia, Hypertrophy, Idiopathic, Lithon- triptics, Panacea, Sciatica, Phthisis, Viscera, In- somnia, and Champagne Spring. But Liver Water excels them all, because a water that will keep the liver in repair would put an end to church troubles, society gossip, and political quarrels. You cannot increase the attractiveness of a resi- dence by detracting from its characteristics as a home. You cannot make a home out of a museum, or a museum out of a home. The two ideas are incompatible. To cram the house with curiosities worth their weight in gold, or to paper the walls CHIPS AND WAFERS. 231 with Government bonds, or to load down the house with pictures, whose only merit to their owner is their cost, is to have neither a home, a gallery, nor a museum. A home is inexorable in its limitations. It will not tolerate excess. It must not be so loud that you cannot hear yourself talk in it or lose your identity in it. It repudiates vulgarity, and will not have decoration at the expense of comfort. The home may be of brick, or stone, or wood, but it must not be of marble. Cold, white marble for a mausoleum or for a tombstone, but not for a home or a communion-table. The eye must feel warm when it looks at a home. Build your house to catch the rays of the rising sun. Those are the rays that drive away the chill- damp of the night and cheer the heavy-hearted on a January morning. Put your bed where you will be awakened by the sunshine. A sunny greeting every day tells in the long run of a long life. The old idea of a " southern and eastern exposure" is the true one for both summer and winter, especially in a northern climate. Build against the western line of your lot, and put your stairway and hall on the least desirable side of your house for sitting in or sleeping in — the northern or western side. Keep on the sunny side of your lot, if you would have a sunny lot in life. Put a cellar under and a garret over your entire house, not a part of it, but the whole of it — an old- 232 SARATOGA CHIPS. fashioned garret for the barrel of old love letters, a cellar for the apples and potatoes. No other por- tions of the house are more fruitful in convenience and comfort. They break the force of the sum- mer's heat and the winter's cold. So arrange your rooms that they will open into one another, and enable you to get the full benefit of the whole space in your house, upstairs and down, when you give an entertainment, and as little of the space as you desire when you wish to econ- omize on coal. Low ceilings will be of advantage in this respect. Ten feet is high enough for a ceil- ing where the mercury spends its nights in the vicinity of zero. While other Spas have been affected by the caprice of the fashionable invalid or the incon- stancy of the morbid vertebrate, and among them the original Spa itself, Carlsbad and Saratoga know no change in public approbation, except an increase in it as the seasons come and go. Last year was the greatest year that either of them has ever known, numerically or financially. As Pyrmont declines, Kissengen rises ; as Epsom recedes, Wiesbaden advances ; but Saratoga and Carlsbad are obliged to make new arrangements for the accommodation of the increasing number of Cur-guests, and pleasure-seekers, and seekers after rest. CHIPS AND WAFERS. 233 The resort to the fountains of the saline elixir is governed by not only the whims of the restless in- valid, but by the caprices of superstition, which are never far from the beautiful trust of man in the in- scrutable providence of God. As long ago as 1556 the springs at Pyrmont, Westphalia, were thronged by those who attached a miraculous virtue to chloride of sodium in solution with carbonic-acid gas. The houses could not accommodate the throngs. Tents had to be provided. Ten thousand came at a time, and on foot. The scene was repeated at the close of the thirty years' war. The lame, the blind, the deaf, the paralytic, and miserable wretches covered with sores came to be healed by drinking of or bathing in the magical waters. The old were carried here from hundreds of miles away, to be made young again by a draught or a bath. And never does the goddess Hygeia feel more forgiving toward her children than when she looks down upon such scenes as these. A MUD BATH. THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. Saratoga has what can be found at no other mineral-water resort in the world — the Winter Cure. So that while we can do here everything that can be done anywhere else, we can do here one thing that can be done nowhere else — we can com- bine the Mineral-Water Treatment with the out-of- door winter sports, which are not to be surpassed by any other method of recruiting the worn-out and thinned-out army of humanity in its heroic fight for a long life and a good digestion. Greece and Rome could not endure their high- toned civilization, and their baths could not save them, because they had no winter in which to re- cruit the energies enfeebled by the summer. All summer and no winter makes the struggle for exist- ence unendurable. " Knowest thou the land where the bright lemon blows ?" I do, and I know it to be the land where the tarantula crawls up your legs and the miasma enfeebles your joints. " Calm lie the" turtles, and so do the real-estate advertisements. If " there, oh, there," my loved one wishes to " wander free," she can wander without me. Yes, deliver this old traveller from the profes- 236 SARATOGA CHIPS. sional climate of the sunny South, whether summer or winter. It will make you feel like sleeping or fighting, never like working for a living, or even for amusement. You grow supple, limber, and polite, indolent and irritable. So long as you are flattered, you are jolly ; as soon as you are contradicted, you are mad enough to strike. Where the sun colors the skin, as the to- bacco colors the meerschaum, you will find . the. hue is that of the bile, and the bilious are making a noble fight of it on the banks of the Rio Grande and the Bay of Bengal. All the pretty saf- fron races are scrofulous. The interminable summer may soften the manners, but it weakens the vital forces. The Vermonter uses his hip-pocket for a memorandum-book, the Texan for a six-shooter, and a stiletto glitters in the belt of the gay mus- tachio " where the golden orange grows." A climate without a winter accounts for it all. Its hot nights alone are enough of themselves to bring on the feuds that lead to the extermination r.:.:: v> KESIDENCE OF E. T. BEACKETT, ESQ. THE SAEATOGA WINTER CURE. 239 of families by the skilful frequency of the shot- gun. Tropical winters, so far from curing malaria, promote it, and with it promote ticks, snakes, and scorpions. The atmosphere alone is a weariness to the flesh. It is an insidious atmosphere, insidious and treacherous. It makes you feel good, but the feeling is perilous. It is the good feeling of a bad liver. It is the enervation of decline. Saratoga is free from the lizards of the South and the blizzards of the West. The wind blows, but not often or ferociously, and the tornado re- coils when it strikes our eastern range of hills, and falls back in bad order when it attacks the army of trees that cover the Adirondacks. The Winter Cure is a Home Cure. It compels that alliance of out-door and in-door life which secures the benefit of both, and avoids the evil effects of either when either has the morbid homo all to itself. It will be the last attainment in civili- zation when the only in-door animal can keep these two hemispheres evenly balanced and joined. The winter necessitates the hearthstone of varie- gated tile, and a chimney that does not smoke, and the fireside made of poetry and pressed brick, which the furnace in the cellar has in vain endeavored to undermine. Think of a battle fought in north- ern New York for our altars and, instead of its firesides, our furnaces in the cellar ! The Saratoga Winter Treatment compels the cul- 240 . SARATOGA CHIPS. tivation of the in-door qualities and the home-life virtues, which are indispensable to the stability of society and the State. It awakens the inventive and reflective faculties, the conversational powers, the decorative arts, and the art of amiable gossip. The crackling fireplace (if it does not smoke) kindles the love of pictures and books, cats and dogs, children and women, and gives the women an opportunity to Christianize the men ! The Winter Cure cures duelling. Open argu- ment is substituted for the secret stiletto. Egypt, Greece, and "Rome would have been alive to-day if they had hired a house for the winter at Saratoga Springs. Tropical nations flash up and die out, the nations that have one hundred days of sleighing live on forever. The summer lands may grow an occa- sional artist or opera-singer, the lands of the tobog- gan-slide produce a whole race of unconquerable men and women. What has become of the Latin and the Frank on this continent ? Whither come the races that are colonizing the world? The North and West are coming with their babel of opinions and patents, and the South and East are going with their scrofula and guitars. Our aesthetes bemoan our deficiency in " atmos- phere," and " ivy," and " lichens," in the " mist of distance to soften the outlines," in " picturesque and gloomy wrongs," in Roman noses, Creole com- THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 243 plexions, and Greek chins. That complaint comes of a gelatine vertebra, which, in turn, comes of summering in the winter of the Antilles. It devel- ops into the bumptiousness of rhetorical facility. It is not the malady that killed Sir John Franklin or Sir William Johnson. There is no remedy for it except the Saratoga Winter Cure. No, no. We Americans should not covet refine- ment as a substitute for stamina. We should not wish to exchange Teutonic pertinacity for Grecian physiognomy or the endurance of the Saxon for the urbanity of the Latin. Only hard substances take the highest polish. The winds that will bring us the cooks and voters that we need blow from the Scandinavian shore, and not from the jungles of India. We need not the enervating breath from the equator, but the invigorating breeze from the open Polar sea. Therefore, when our aesthetes pipe unto us we cannot dance, and when they whine we cannot lament. There is one injurious effect of the climate of this planet that is not so injurious at the North as at the South during the winter. It may be called the perspiration peril. You perspire easily, and cool rapidly. The slightest exertion opens all the pores, the shortest pause closes them all. This moment is, indeed, momentous. The victims of pneumonia and bronchitis, of quick and slow con- sumption, are caught by its chill and thrown by its 244 SARATOGA CHIPS. shock. A ride home from a hot dance, a chat of a few seconds with a friend on the street while your skin is moist and warm, and the demon of the at- mosphere has done his deadly work with the pre- cision of an assassin. u Where did I catch this cold ?" is an every-day conundrum. You caught it on one of your voyages of this planet on its axis. On one of these revolutions Bombi, the rhinoc- eros, caught his death of cold — Bombi with all his cheek and hide ! " The keeper threw open both of the big doors' ' on the big beast, and Bombi shiv- ered, groaned, and died — a victim to the transition peril. The shiver that you feel when you sit down in a profuse perspiration under the tree will be called pneumonia in your obituary. It is the busi- ness of the planet to revolve upon its axis and around the sun, without any regard whatever to the thoughtlessness of Bombi's keeper or the lovely daughter's satin slippers and nude arms. The " Roman fever" begins with the pause in the shade, to escape the direct rays of the sun. No one can travel under the blue sky of Italy in winter or summer without observing and feeling the differ- ence between the open sunshine of the street and the shadow of the houses. It is that transition to which the native becomes acclimated, and which few foreigners can survive. The same effect is produced by our climate, the same in kind, less in degree. We wilt gradually or die suddenly with the American instead of the THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 247 Roman fever. It is the climate of the planet on which life is an incident, and the life of man the most incidental of all — the life that is but a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away. But the Northern winter is not by any means so addicted to the perspiration peril as the South- ern. It is not absolutely free from it, but it is comparatively free from it. You, at least, escape the night perspiration, which leaves you as wearied and exhausted when you awake in the morning as when you went to sleep in the evening. You may have to raise your umbrella in the middle of the day for a few days in August, but you need never be subjected to the destroying strain of sitting on your door-step with your tongue out for four months of the year. It is impossible to sink to so low a state of relaxation in the land of the frozen river and the snow as in the section where the " lazy gallants bask in ladies' eyes." There is no tonic for the system like an atmos- phere that contains it. No remedy can compare with it. When it is found, it is to be treated as truth is to be treated. You are to buy it, and sell it not. If, however, you are compelled to sell it, you can sell it to advantage, if you have bought it with a house and lot at pleasant Saratoga. There you may have air, land, sun, water, and winter all for what you pay elsewhere for your house alone, from which 248 SARATOGA CHIPS. you are compelled to nee to escape its hot nights, cockatrices, and yellow jackets. What must be the horror of Hygeia, then, to see her children fleeing from Saratoga to New York in September, the month that has the worst reputation for prostrating malaria of any month of the twelve, especially at the great centres of seething population. It is the period of decaying vegetation. The frost has not killed the germs of mephitis in the air or stopped the miasmatic exhalations from the ground. Preachers sink exhausted in the pulpit, clerks faint at their desks, and ladies are prostrated by their ordinary ronnd of household duties. All lose what they have gained by their summer vaca- tion by returning to their posts before the summer is over. It often proves an irrecoverable loss. But a change is setting in. The life of those who are living it so as to make the most of it is other-ended. Saratoga, with its Winter Cure, and Mineral- Water Cure, and Climate Cure, and Gayety Cure, is getting to be the big end of life. New York and New Orleans, with their malarious summers and nefarious politics, are henceforth to have the little end of life. The city is a workshop, distracting to the wits, shattering to the nerves, poisonous to the lungs. The community of villas is resuming the place that it had in classic days, as the place of residence of those who wish to mix enjoyment with business and rec- reation with the greed for gain. THE SARATOGA WINTER CURE. 249 'Nor shall they be able to complain that the place of restful homes is dull. They shall have excite- ment enough, bnt it shall not be that which is eat- ing the flesh from their bones and the hair from their heads. It shall restore the lost brawn, and conceal the bald crowns with a - picturesque toque, and color their wattles as red as a turkey-gobbler's. The Cosmopolitan Spa has always had the whole world at its doors in summer ; now there is no more lively and exhilarating scene in winter than that which the winter sports and the Winter Cure have brought to Saratoga. The toboggan-slide has no superior for length, rapidity, management, and geographical location. Some need only the Winter Treatment. One winter of it may restore them. They may need only to allow the atmosphere of winter to get at them, and into them, and through them. They should go into it, in order that it may get into them. It is bathing in it and breathing it. Cold air seldom injures, hot air is to some very injurious. It is not the winter, but the transitions from cold weather to warm in winter that does the injury. An open winter may lower the bills for coal, but it raises the bills of mortality. The long, uniform sunny winter of Saratoga Springs has been the saving of many a useful man and noble woman, although it may have prolonged some lives that might as well have been abbreviated. The winters of 1883-84 and 1886-87 at Saratoga 250 SARATOGA CHIPS. will long be remembered for the new lease of life they gave to many a good soldier that was falling out on the march. The only hope for the human family is to pass a Saratoga winter through its dilapidated constitu- tion. The author of this book will be glad to answer the inquiries of any one who wishes to secure a home at Saratoga Springs. SARATOGA SPRINGS: ITS PUBLIC OFFICIALS; CHURCHES; SCHOOLS; ASSOCIATIONS; PHYSICIANS; RAILWAYS; BANKS; STORES; HOTELS; MINERAL SPRINGS; NEWSPAPERS; ARCHI- TECTS ; DRIVES ; WALKS ; and REAL ESTATE DEALERS. TO ADVERTISERS. The publishers of this book would call the special attention of advertisers to the following pages of it. The advertisements and the reading matter will be so arranged as to make it a very desirable place for advertisements of the highest class. Those who wish to advertise in future editions should apply at once to the publishers, FUNK & WAGNALLS, 18 & 20 Astor Place, New York. SAEATOGA TILLAGE OFFICIALS. President. — Lewis Wood. BOARD OF TRUSTEES. W. H. Gailor, B. T. Bacon, Frank W. Wells, Patrick Sheehan, Michael Finn, B. W. Clapp. Tillage Cleric. — S. F. Corey. Village Attorney. — Charles H. Tefft, Jr. Village Surveyor. — L. H. Cramer. Postmaster. — George W. Langdon. Established 18 Years. SARATOGA REAL ESTATE OFFICE. CONKLING & KNAPP, " ml Instate ^vohtxs t Ho. 6 POST-OFFICS ARCADH, Offer the most desirable (Real Estate in Saratoga Springs and vicinity for sale. Also make a specialty of Renting Furnished Cottages for the Season. Call on them before going elsewhere. Their long ex- perience in the business enables them to offer greater bargains than any other parties. Open every Day and Evening all the Year round, FROM 6 A.M. TO lO P.M. THE Spring Street, near Broadway. J® AR ATO O A J® PRINOS. -••■Ill^tllim— — ^HE BNCL0SED PAVILI0M Which contains the Hathorn Spring, has been greatly en- larged and very much improved, and now affords every convenience and comfort for visitors and invalids. It is exactly in the centre of the village, very near all the hotels, boarding-houses, stores, halls, thoroughfares and railway stations. It is so situated and arranged as to be cool during the hottest days of summer, and it is warmed during the winter, and therefore perfectly comfortable in the coldest weather. Whatever may be the weather at any season of the year, the Hathorn Pavilion is always pleasant and attractive. Such a resort has long been demanded at Saratoga Springs, and is thoroughly appreciated, hundreds of persons having availed themselves of it during the past winter. Sathorn Water. HE Hathorn Spring Water has earned so extensive and satisfactory a reputation that testimonials are superfluous. It is known everywhere as a quick and thorough (Remedy for TORPID LIVER, Diseased Kidneys, Sluggish Blood, Dyspepsia, GASTRALGIA, and all ills of the Stomach that cause melan= cholia, headache and nervous prostration. It has been enthusiastically approved by hun= dreds of thousands of persons who have quaffed its sparkling liquid at the brink of the Spring itself while other hundreds of thousands, at a distance, have found its perfectly preserved bottled waters to be a long=wished=for boon. It never dulls into inactivity by long continued use. The secretory 'functions respond to its pleas= antly effervescent demand with unfailing readiness. It never causes pain or nausea. The only way in which the system is aware of its presence is by the beneficent effects it produces. THE WAJ^0^-5pRI|MG-y/\TE^ It ^oniains |oto|j |njur L ious CF. CHANDLER, Ph.D., M.D., of the School of Mines, • Columbia College, New York, who stands as a chem- ist at the head of his profession, says : " No water in Saratoga County is more highly favored by nature than the Hathorn Water. If the popular verdict accords it the preference, the water will merit it. There is nothing in the water that can in any way injure the most delicately organized system, provided it is not used in excess, or at im- proper times." THE LEADING AMERICAN SPRING. • The annual sale in bottles of this most popular mineral water VERY LARGELY EXCEEDS the sale in bottles of all other natural bottled mineral waters of Saratoga combined. ]^he J4athof(jn JSprinq Water Is Soli in Glass Bottles only— Pints and Quarts. PRICES AS FOLLOWS t One Case, 4 dozen pints, . . . . $6 oo One Half-Case, 2 doze* pints, ... 3 oo One Case, 2 dozen quarts, . . . 5 oo Delivered free on board at Saratoga, securely packed for shipment. Delivery at any place in New York, Brooklyn or Jersey City, 50 cents per package additional. SOLD BY GROCERS, WINE MERCHANTS, DRUGGISTS AND HOTELS. Orders will receive prompt attention, and will be for- warded to destination by the best freight lines. E. H. HATHORN, jM^rn spring, Saratoga, N. Y. LAKE ANNA, MT. MCGREGOR. MAGNETIC SPUING WATER. Spring Avenue, a few minutes' walk from the leading Hotels. The proprietor has made extensive and expensive im- provements in his BATHING ESTABLISHMENT. It is elegant and comfortable. It is the only one in Saratoga which has porcelain-lined bath-tubs. The build- ing is provided with steam heater and electric bells, and no effort will be spared to contribute to the comfort and enjoyment of the bathers. These magnetic water baths are, as is well known, a remedy for rheumatism, neuralgia, nervous prostration, and diseases peculiar to women. They have a powerful effect also in relieving weariness and exhaustion. They produce healthy sleep. They are at once a tonic and a stimulant, and are very cleansing and softening to the skin. AS A REMEDIAL DRINK the Magnetic Spring Water is too well and widely known to need testimonials. It has worked wonderful cures in cases of dyspepsia, liver difficulties, kidney troubles, and weakness of the lungs. A regular and systematic use of it results in toning up the constitution worn down by overwork, and it is very agreeable to the taste. A conveyance will be run to and from the spring dur- ing the season through the principal thoroughfares. All inquiries promptly answered by D. H. Porter. SAKATOGA PHYSICIANS. Babcock, M. N. Boyce, F. M. Comstock, G. F. Craighead, E. D. Farrell, J. J. Grant, C. S. Hall, W. H. Hamilton, Robert. Hewitt, Adelbert. Hodgman, W. H. Inlay, E. G. McEwen, R. C. Moriarta, I). C. Pearsall, S. J., Homoeopathist. Pearsall, J. A., " Reynolds, T. B. Robens, T. Stewart, Mrs. Mary E. Strong, S. S. Strong, S. E. Travers, O. J., Homoeopathist. Wilson, Mrs. Wheeler. Patients for board and treatment are received by Drs. Grant, Hamilton, Robens, Strong, Stewart, and Wilson, and every attention is given to their health, comfort, and recreation. Letters addressed to either of these physicians will receive prompt attention. 4HA 1 Fast Time and Elegant Service by the Picturesque N. Y. CENTRAL AND HUDSON RIVER R. R., Along the world-famed Hudson River between New Tork and Saratoga ; through the beautiful Mohawk Valley between Saratoga and Ruffnlo, Xiagara Falls and the West. THE ONLY GREAT FOUR-TRACK RAILROAD IN THE WORLD. o i3 ri" S° o d ^ to • bO cei CO .S 5 3 P.^1 o to r a 5 (U pj £ tf CO o <,: ;q 8^ a toS * 5 Is ., HfflGGSIS & jVWVWSi 388 Broadway, 0pp> u - s - Hotel> S^ratog^ Springs, H. Y. Established 1864. Walter Jennery, Dealer in '9 No. 428 Broadway, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. F. M. OLMSTED & CO., HOSIERY, GLOVES, UNDERWEAR, AND FINE FURNISHINGS, No. 379 BROADWAY, First Store South of U. S. Hotel, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. JOHN JQ H NSO N 6 CO. s$&^«ss to do first-class Book, Law and Job Printing 15 to 50 per cent, lower than any other firm in Saratoga. They also supply fine Stationery to thousands at these prices : 25 envelopes, 5 cents ; 24 sheets writing paper, 5 cents ; 18 sheets legal cap, or foolscap, 10 cents ; a box of 250 envelopes, 40 cents ; 4S0 sheets of fine paper for 90 cents. Old papers, 20 cents, per . -... nr>inrn nnillTrnn at the popular office 3 of the LU H "Till ItU I lllll I LHui THE SiVKATOGA ATHENAEUM. The object of the Saratoga Athenaeum is to furnish Saratoga Springs with a Public Circulating and Reference Library, a Public Reading-Room, a Lectureship, a School of Design, a Museum, an Art Gallery, a department of Science, a Gymnasium, and such conveniences for indoor games as shall be in keeping with the spirit and scope of such an institution. The Saratoga Athenaeum was organized December 27th, 1884 ; trustees were elected February 17th, 1885, the association was incorporated March 13th, 1885, and the constitution was adopted at the first annual meeting, De- cember 28th, 1885. BOARD OP TRUSTEES. Nathan Sheppard, President. W. B. French, Secretary, C. C. Lester, Treasurer, Spencer Trask, J. R. Chapman, J. W. Drexel, W. R. Terrett, A. de R. McKair, H. S. Leech. S. Gifford Slocum, EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. Nathan Sheppard, S. Gifford Slocum. C. C. Lester, LIBRARIAN. Miss Juliet McB. Hill. LADIES COMMITTEE. Mrs. McNair, Chairman, Mrs. S. G. Slocum, Secretary, " W. B. French, n Spencer Trask, " Batcheller, " Waldo Rich, " Nathan Sheppard, Miss Mary Shepherd, " W. R. Terrett, " Susan Lester, M W. H. Biyant, " Carrie A. Hamilton, " McEwen, " Miriam W. Dowd, " Manning, it Anna Jones, " Brackett, " Nellie Walworth. " W. H. Bockes, LIFE MEMBERS. J. R. Chapman, A. de R. McNair, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Wm. Ingham, Edward Kearney, B. W. Clapp, Spencer Trask, J. M. Marvin, Nathan Sheppard, R. C. McEwen, W. T. Rockwood, W. R. Weed, W. B. French, T. B. Reynolds, G. R. Sherman, H. S. Leech, J. W. Fuller, George K. Thomas, C. C. Lester, Thomas B. Carroll, S. G. Slocum, J. M. Jones, W. H. Bockes, Abel Putnam, W. A. Shepard, J. W. Burtis, S. E. Strong, J. P. Conkling, Albert Spencer, W. H. Pitkin, James Mi n gay, G. Mannheimer. J. W. Drexel, The life-membership fee is one hundred dollars, which may be paid in four annual payments. The annual mem- bership fee is five dollars. Members' families are entitled to the use of the Library, Reading-Room, and the School of Design Room for drawing, sketching, and wood -carv- ing. There are fifty casts of classical subjects in the School of Design Room. Ticket to the Library and Reading-Room for one year two dollars, for one month fifty cents, for one week twenty-five cents. FIRST UilTlO&M BAM, SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. A. BOCKES, President. P. P. WIGGINS, Vice-Pres't. WM. HAY BOCKES, Cashier. CAPITAL $100,000 I Surplus and Profits, over $100,000 TRANSACTS A GENERAL BANKING BUSINESS C. B. Thomas. THOMAS & BROWN, W. E. Brown. COAL, WOOD, KINDLINGS, CHARCOAL, CEMENTS (Best American, English and Roman), LIME, SEA-SAND, PLASTER, HAIR. Offices : \ %HBK%ggk&mE£, ! SARATOGA SPRINGS, I. Y. Orders left at Broadway office, or sent by telephone, will receive prompt attention. OPEN THE YEAR ROUND. SARATOGA SPRINGS. Directly opposite the United States Hotel ; near Depot, Stores, Springs and Athencenm Reading Room. HEADQUARTERS EOR SARATOGA WINTER SPORTS. NEWLY FURNISHED THROUGHOUT, And provided with every comfort and convenience of a Winter as well as Summer Hotel, for Permanent and Transient Guests. W. W. WORDEN, Proprietor. ATHENAEUM READING-ROOM. One block north of United States Hotel, east side of Broadway, corner of Caroline Street. Cool and pleasant room. Open every day, except Sundays and holidays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Daily papers, illustrated papers, comic papers, children's papers, popular magazines, art and sci- ence periodicals. Circulating library. Twenty-live cents a week, 50 cents a month, $2 a year. Contributions of money, books, and periodicals will be thankfully received. DR. ROBERT HAMILTON'S MEDICAL INSTITUTE AND SUMMER RESORT. Established in 1857. Open all the year. Physicians— R. Hamilton, M.D.; Mrs. A. P. Ketchum, M.D., Assistant. This establishment is charmingly located, near the principal Springs, Churches and Hotels, and carefully adapted to the requirements of invalids and guests. The BOARDING DEPARTMENT is well regulated, the Halls and Parlors unusually pleasant, and the Sleeping-rooms cheerful, airy and well furnished. The institution is open as a summer boarding-house during the season, is kept in good style, and in such a manner that no features of a medical institution are observable. Among its patrons are Rev. John P. Newman, D.D.; Rev. E. A. Roche. D.D.; Rev. John Cookman, D.D.; John N. Stearns ; Rev. J. W. Olm- sted, D.D., and prominent men in Church and State. SPECIAL INDUCEMENTS are offered to those seeking health, as, in addition to the ordinary medicinal agents employed in general practice, the most Scientific Remedial Appliances are here in use, including Electro-Chemical, Sulphur and other Baths, Swedish Movement, Health Lift, Inhalation, etc. SPECIALTY of Chronic Diseases and Female and Lung affections. LECTURES weekly, by Dr HAMILTON and others. " Dr. Hamilton is one of the most reliable consulting physicians in Saratoga, and having long re- sided and practiced in Saratoga, and observed the various spring waters on different constitutions and in different diseases, is qualified to give advice to those who wish to drink the mineral waters in a systematic way and to the best advantage. Dr. Hamilton makes a specialty of this practice, and is recognized as a most excellent authority on the subject." TERMS, from $10 to $20 per week, depending upon the room occupied and attention required, For further information apply to R. HAMILTON, M.D., Saratoga Springs, N. Y. AS NECESSARY TO SARATOGA AS A NEST TO A BIRD, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in speaking thus of the Boston City Library, speaks a word for such a library at Saratoga Springs : " If a scholar, no matter how poor, wants to consult a rare and costly book, it is put into his hands, and he can sit down at a quiet table, or, in many cases, carry it to his home and keep it until it has given up whatever it has of useful matter for him. I have found this privilege inestimable, and, when a library is once fairly begun, it becomes more and more valuable every year, as a matter of course, for it grows like a rolling snow-ball. Such a library is as necessary to a town as a nest is to a pair of birds. Scholars are sure to be hatched in it sooner or later, and in all such institutions you will see a good many old birds that love to nestle, and find themselves very warm and comfortable whether they breed and sing or not." Who would not like to see the day when Saratoga shall furnish this " quiet table" to rising scholars and this " comfortable nest ' ' to the " old birds" who want to study as well as rest in Saratoga ? The reading-room Dr. Holmes calls a school-room : " In the reading-room belonging to our city library I see large numbers of persons, silent, occupied, intent on the papers, magazines, reviews, which are abundantly provided for them. They are at school with no master to pay." j3.