By GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND.
As nations rise in wealth, comfort and communications, they discover
that the simplest of all things, mere climate or air, is of the greatest
value. The English race paid early attention to this question and seized
upon the sheltered positions, the _spas_ and baths as places of resort
both for weak systems and for luxurious existence. Religion itself
conveniently placed its miracles and chapels where the best climate or
the most healing waters were found.
Soon after America was discovered there spread through the most
successful nations a belief in a Golden Spring, an El Dorado, and this
was pursued notably in Florida, where many yet believe that the most
golden spring is to be found, as its season hardly begins till February
or March, and is used to offset a lingering winter and the angry winds of
the northern sea coast country.
One of the most notable instances of seeking a climate in our colonial
history is that of Sir William Johnson, who lived among the six nations
of Indians about the Mohawk, and being a portly man with European habits
of life, he found his old age, in spite of his active and military
youth, affected by gouts and by the heavy stagnant air of the limestone
valleys in which he lived, and he was one of the first Americans to
select at once a seacoast resort and the mineral springs. We need not
repeat the story of how the Indians, among whom he married, concluded in
their affection for him to show him their celebrated mineral spring, and
took him on a litter through hidden paths to the Tufa rock of Saratoga,
where he, the first of white men, saw the reflection of his face in the
meteoric water there. It is not as well known that Sir William Johnson
also made himself a road to the sea beach, near New London, where he went
in summer, not for mineral water, but for sea air, which he esteemed so
much more valuable.
Climate, indeed, is one of the most important subjects to be considered
by superior men, and the earliest travelers in this country noted down
where they escaped the insects, where the nights were cool, where the
trade winds blew, etc. The oranges of Florida, for instance, were noted
by the old Spanish chroniclers as the finest that grew in their immense
dominions, and that perfection is kept up to the present time.
General Washington, a man of good condition, was one of the early
annual seekers for a pleasant climate, which he found west of the North
Mountain, about Berkeley Springs, where he had a hut built, and for
years repaired there with his chicken cocks and horses. When he went
through Virginia as a young surveyor, he observed the differences in the
temperature, and in the humidity, and located some of the best springs
and resorts in the Old Dominion. When Washington first visited Saratoga
he endeavored, at once, to purchase the tract enclosing the few sources
at that time known, so much was he impressed with the superiority of the
climate of New York in summer over that of Virginia.
Mr. Jefferson, who was one of the best amateurs in the country at all
sorts of subjects, although he lived on the top of a mountain above
the tidewater region, and in sight of other peaks, would not spend his
summers at home about Charlottsville, but had a road cut far into the
west and built himself a sort of lodge called Poplar Forest, in the high
country about Lynchburgh; it was a brick house on a slope, one story
high in front and two stories high in the rear, of octagon shape, with a
portico in front and a veranda in the rear. To this spot Jefferson went
both in summer and in autumn to escape his political followers, and to
think, read and sleep.
Jefferson was one of the earliest weather prophets in this country and
in his works are found many references to the American climate, of use
to any future climatologist. About 1805 he wrote to Mr. Volney, the
philosopher: “In no case does habit attach our choice or judgment more
than in climate. The Canadian glows with delight in his sleigh and snow,
the very idea of which gives me the shivers. The changes between heat
and cold in America are greater and more frequent, and the extremes
comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe.
Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller
changes of Europe affect the European, but he is greatly affected by
ours. As our sky is always clear and that of Europe always cloudy, there
is a greater accumulation of heat here than there in the same parallel.
The changes between wet and dry are much more frequent and sudden in
Europe than in America, for though we have double the rain, it falls in
half the time. Taking all these together, I prefer much the climate of
the United States to that of Europe, and I think it a more cheerful one.
It is our cloudless sky which has eradicated from our constitutions all
disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited
from our English ancestors. Still, I do not wonder that a European should
prefer his grey to our azure sky.”
This description in the main holds good to our time, although social
causes have increased here the tendency to suicide, though perhaps the
ratio of suicide is no greater in America now than it ever was. If we add
dueling, which was a form of suicide, to the regular cases of suicide, I
have my doubts whether more Americans make away with themselves now than
in the early days. I happen to think of one signer of the Declaration
of Independence who died from mental excitement over signing that
instrument, of another who was poisoned, and of a third who was killed by
a fellow patriot in a duel.
Jefferson also noted in 1809, under “Cultivation,” the changes in the
American climate, in a letter to Dr. Chapman: “I remember,” said he,
“that when I was a small boy, say sixty years ago, snows were frequent
and deep in every winter, to my knee very often, to my waist sometimes,
and that they covered the earth long. And I remember while yet young to
have heard from very old men that in their youth the winters had been
still colder, with deeper and longer snows. In the year 1772 we had a
snow two feet deep in the Champagne parts of this state, and three feet
in the counties next below the mountains. But when I was President the
average fall of snow for the seven winters was only 14½ inches, and the
ground was covered but sixteen days in each winter on an average of the
whole. I noticed the change in our climate in my ‘Notes on Virginia,’
but since that time public vocations have taken my attention from the
subject, nor do I know of any source in Virginia now existing, from which
anything on climate can be derived. Dr. Williamson has written on the
subject, and Mr. Williams in his ‘History of Vermont’ has an essay on the
subject of climate.”
Addressing Mr. Louis E. Beck at Albany, N. Y., in 1824, when he was a
very old man, Jefferson said:
“I thank you for your pamphlet on the climate of the West; although it
does not yet establish a satisfactory theory, it is an additional step
toward it. My own was perhaps the first attempt to bring together the
few facts then known, and suggest them to public attention, and they
were written before the close of the revolutionary war, when the western
country was a wilderness untrodden but by the feet of the savage or the
hunter. It is now flourishing in population and science, and after a few
more years of observation and collection of facts, they will doubtless
furnish a theory of their climate. Years are requisite for this, steady
attention to the thermometer, to the plants growing there, the times of
their leafing and flowering, its prevalent winds, quantities of rain and
snow, temperature of fountains, animal inhabitants, etc. We want this,
indeed, for all the states, and the work should be repeated once or twice
in a century to show the effects of clearing and culture toward changes
of climate.”
Thus promptly did our early scholars and sages watch the climatic
relations of the country to its population and vitality. These “Notes
on Virginia,” which Jefferson wrote during the Revolution, contain
five years’ instrumental observation on rain, heat and wind taken at
Williamsburgh, the tidewater capital, which is about forty miles from
Fortress Monroe, which latter place has since become a winter resort. He
computed that we had forty-seven inches of rain annually, considerably
more than fell in Europe, but a much larger proportion of sunshine than
there, only half as many cloudy days as in France and Germany, and the
statesman says about the Alleghany Mountain region, of which Chautauqua
Lake is an outpost:
“It is remarkable that proceeding on the same parallel of latitude
westerly, the climate becomes colder in like manner as when you proceed
northerly. This continues to be the case until you attain the summit
of the Alleghany, which is the highest land between the ocean and
the Mississippi. From thence, descending in the same latitude to the
Mississippi, the change reverses, and, if we may believe travelers, it
becomes warmer there than it is on the same latitude on the sea side.
On the higher parts of mountains, where it is absolutely colder than it
is on the plains on which they stand, frosts do not appear so early by
a considerable time in autumn, and go off sooner in the spring than on
the plains. I have known frost so severe as to kill the hickory trees
round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms
then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain. A change in
our climate is taking place very sensibly, and both heats and colds are
becoming much more moderate, within the memory even of the middle-aged.”
General Washington, it may not be generally known, kept all his early
diaries on the blank leaves of the “Virginia Almanac,” which was printed
at Williamsburgh, showing that he watched the weather as if it were a
part of public life.
Washington came to the vicinity of Chautauqua Lake in 1753, when he was
scarcely of age, and this journey makes his earliest diary. He went
from Williamsburgh to Fredericksburgh, thence to Alexandria, thence to
Winchester in the valley of Virginia, thence to Cumberland, Maryland,
and down the Monongahela River and up the Alleghany to French Creek, or
the Venango. All the land was then a wilderness. Washington reported
from hearsay, at Venango, that there were four forts, the first of them
on French Creek near a small lake, the next on Lake Erie about 15 miles
from the other, from which it was 120 miles to the fort at the falls of
Lake Erie. From the fort on Lake Erie to Montreal was about 600 miles,
which the French only required four weeks to traverse in good weather.
Washington noted the good land about Venango and the extensive and rich
meadows, one of which was four miles in length. When Washington was
interested in connecting Lake Erie with the waters of the Ohio by a
canal, he was very explicit in addressing General William Irvine about
the climate traits of Chautauqua Lake; this General Irvine was a doctor
born in Ireland and settled at Carlisle, Pa., and he was among the first
men to understand the climate of Lake Erie, and he managed to get for
Pennsylvania a frontage on this lake.
In the pursuit of climate, it is probable that the first movements were
made by the people of the populous states of Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Any one who possesses a library of travels in America, conveying
successive pictures of our social life from colonial times down to the
day of railroads, will discover numbers of perished watering places.
For instance, about the time of the Revolution, the chief summer resorts
in Pennsylvania were about York, as at York Springs, and I possess
pictures of old log hotels at some of these resorts, where the outspurs
of the Blue Mountains gave a little altitude above the surrounding
plains. The wounded soldiers in the Revolution were sent up to Ephrata
and Litiz and Bethlehem, where the air was good and nurses were to be had.
These Blue Mountains were not ascended until 1716, when Governor
Spotiswood of Virginia undertook to find where the rivers of that state
had their fountains, and he took an ensign in the British army and
went to the frontier, where he was joined by some gentlemen and some
militia rangers, about fifty in all, with pack-horses and much liquor,
and this little army started out from near the site of the battle of
Chancellorsville, and it took them a week to get to the top of the Blue
Ridge at Swift Run Gap, thirty-six days after the Governor had left
Williamsburgh. They went down into the Shenandoah Valley and called
that flowing river the Euphrates. So much delighted was Spotiswood with
the air and scenery of the mountains that he instituted an order of
knighthood called the Tramontane order.
Such was the beginning of human knowledge of the Alleghanies, nearly 170
years ago. The lives of three not very old men would have spanned from
that day to this. The nearest approach of that Alleghany range, of which
the Blue Ridge was the first parallel, to the great interior lakes of
North America, is at Chautauqua. At this lake the Alleghany ridge, which
divides the sources of the Ohio valley from the great lakes, is between
800 and 1400 feet high, every hill arable, and the earliest settlers
observed how quickly the apples, pears and plums succeeded in the mild
climate. They were surprised to find, at an altitude of more than 1300
feet above the ocean, a noble sheet of water 20 miles long. Some of the
earliest settlers in this region came from the Blue Mountain country,
buying their land from the Holland Land Company of New York, of which
William H. Seward was long the attorney. Some of the first settlers
pitched their cabins about 1803.
It is understood that Chautauqua Lake was first navigated about 1782,
when the Revolutionary war was almost done and the battle of Yorktown had
been fought. Desirous of keeping up some show of hostility, about 1800
British and Indians were sent to recapture Pittsburgh, and they launched
their canoes on this lake, but their spies came back and told them that
the Americans were on the lookout. Earlier than this, about 1752, when
the French resolved to seize on the head waters of the Ohio, they left
Niagara Fort by water in April and got to a place they called Chadacoin
(undoubtedly Chautauqua) on Lake Erie, where they began to cut timber
and prepared to build a fort, but their engineer coming on afterward put
a stop to it, saying that the Chautauqua River was too shallow to carry
out any craft with provisions to the Ohio. The man who had begun building
the fort, M. Babeer, was so much pleased with the spot that he insisted
on continuing his work, and he demanded that his opponent give him a
certificate to excuse himself to the governor for not selecting so good a
place. Consequently the fort was built at Erie, or Presqu’Ile.
The region about Chautauqua Lake is therefore, in an imperial sense,
the oldest in America, the neighborhood for which two great empires
contended, and at the time the French were meditating the seizure of
these high lands and water-courses, twelve Virginians, two of whom were
named Washington, formed the Ohio Company, before the year 1750.
Thus a third of a century only elapsed between the discovery of the Blue
Ridge and the enterprises to connect the Alleghanies and the lakes on the
part of two distinguished nations.
The high lands and hills about Chautauqua were familiar objects to the
subjects of Louis XV. on their way to meet the adolescent Washington,
and young Jumondville, who fell before Washington’s night assault, had
cooled his fevered eyes on the green forests of the Chautauqua summits.
In forty-six years more, old General Wayne, who used this region as the
base of observations against the Indians of Michigan and Ohio, closed
his eyes almost within sight of the Chautauqua hillocks, and, while his
body was still lying in the fort where he breathed his last, Commodore
Perry was building a crude navy to sweep Lake Erie of the British. Perry
came through New York state to Lake Ontario, from thence went to Buffalo
and took a sleigh on the ice for Erie, also passing within sight of the
high knobs of Chautauqua. Several of his vessels went from the region
of Buffalo, and at the age of twenty-seven this young officer won a fame
hardly surpassed in the naval history of the New World.
The influence of the lake and western climate on the seamen and soldiers
who visited it was almost immediately seen in their location hereabout
and settling of many towns on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and if
both sides of this lake were American, there seems to be little doubt
that it would now be approaching the time of being the greatest center
of population in the New World. That center has been driven down the hot
Ohio valley by the limitations of our boundary, which giving not American
soil to the north of Lake Erie, has reluctantly abandoned the cool summer
air and clear fine winters of the lakes for the hot limestone inclosures
of the streams to the south.
Yet the present growth of towns along Lake Erie shows with what alacrity
the populations of the lower West precipitate themselves against the
shores of the lake. Cleveland is growing faster than Cincinnati. Detroit,
long retarded by a _habitant_ population, is growing faster than
Louisville. Toledo is growing faster than Wheeling. Buffalo has almost
outgrown its more ancient neighbor of Pittsburgh. Chicago and Milwaukee
stride ahead of St. Louis and Memphis. When the summer comes and the
great national conventions choose their places of meeting, they benefit
by experience, and both assemble the same year at Chicago to get the air
of the lakes instead of sweltering in St. Louis or Cincinnati.
The fine climate about Chautauqua is in much a matter of altitude.
Proceeding either east or west from this point, the shores of the lakes
lie comparatively flat, and in the state of Ohio there is but one
eminence sufficient to be called a mountain, and that is the Little
Mountain not far from Painesville, a mere knob only about 200 feet above
the plain, and ten miles back from Lake Erie. Even here some comfort can
be had by the inhabitants of the plain, and a hotel was built at least
fifty years ago.
The rise of public biography on the southern shore of Lake Erie has not
been overlooked by the general reader; Garfield, Giddings, Wade, General
McPherson, Hon. Henry B. Payne, Governor Todd, William Howells, Chief
Justice Waite and many others are among the men whose minds have been
lifted by the breezes from the lake, and which have already begun to
display an energizing character attracting the attention of the whole
country.
It has only been eighty-eight years since the first surveyors landed
at Conneaut to survey the military lands of Connecticut and organize
northern Ohio. When they pulled their boats ashore, which they had taken
from Buffalo up the lake, they were so touched with their improved health
that they moored on the beach, had prayer together and resolved to make
the first day in the West a holiday. Mr. Harvey Rice in his recent
history of the Western Reserve says: “The day was remarkably pleasant
and the air bracing, and they partook of an extemporized feast with
a keen relish, and gave for one of the toasts, ‘May these fifty sons
and daughters multiply in sixteen years sixteen times fifty.’” Seven
weeks after this picnic the site of Cleveland was selected for a city.
Twenty-two years after that the first steamboat starting from Buffalo
passed within sight of Chautauqua and entered the harbor of Cleveland and
went on to Detroit.
I have been almost an extensive traveler in the United States, not like
commercial travelers, merely visiting the towns and trading points, but
the scenery and the health resorts. About twenty-four years ago I went
on the press and the vocation of special correspondent was then just
rising into consideration, and I threw myself toward it, desiring to
gratify “the lust of the eye” by my newspaper facilities. Even before I
left school I had tramped through the Alleghany mountains, through the
Sinking Spring valley, the Seven mountains and the fountain town called
Bellefonte, in the heart of the Alleghanies. Next I went through the
Lackawanna and Wyoming valleys, visited the old resorts in the lap of
Pennsylvania under the Blue Mountains, and in the midst of the war was
a battle correspondent at such places as the Fauquier White Sulphur
Springs. Next, lecturing opportunities took me through New York state and
the West, and I visited Fredonia twice, in the vicinity of Chautauqua
Lake, and there heard of the beautiful region almost overhanging it, on
the highlands. With renewed opportunities I have been in California,
about Los Angeles, and at Santa Barbara, and in southern Georgia and
Florida, and in Cuba, at the Hot Springs of Arkansas, on the summits
of the Osage mountains where the trade wind blows, at Springfield and
through the Indian territory, and at San Antonio, in Texas, with smaller
journeys to Oaklands and the Green Brier White Sulphur Springs, on the
Alleghany tops and the Peaks of Otter, and along all our coasts as far as
Mount Desert and New Brunswick, and several times in the White Mountains,
down the St. Lawrence to the sea and out the Northern Pacific railroad,
and I miss no opportunity, when I can afford it, to extend my information
of places and people.
This is only said in answer to your request to give some idea of the
relative quality of the air about Chautauqua Lake. I have seen no place
where the air is so pure and the nights so agreeable anywhere along our
lakes, and the spot seems almost arranged by nature with a reference to
the anticipated arrangement of the people and the lines of communication
in this republic.
When you consider that the low grade railroad route to the West must
turn the Alleghany mountains to the North and use the limited space
between those mountain spurs and the lake to reach the West without
unnecessary expenditure of steam power, it would seem that Chautauqua
Lake had been adjusted to the coming lines of travel, and we already have
the Lake Shore, the Nickel Plate, the Erie, and the different Alleghany
River lines, with more lines soon to come, to connect the Lehigh, the
Lackawanna, the West Shore, and kindred systems with the great West.
Surely the spot is most agreeable for health and enjoyment to the great
homogeneous people who are nearly evenly divided in numbers by the
Alleghany range. The Alleghany mountains have hardly commenced their
material development, and being full of coal, oil, iron, and the more
precious minerals, the time is approaching when that mountain range will
contain on its slopes the densest population in America, and its mineral
resources be worked from the vicinity of Buffalo to Alabama.
My brother, Doctor Ralph M. Townsend, who was a surgeon connected with
the medical schools of Philadelphia, and also a writer, was taken ill
about ten years ago and compelled to search up and down the world for
a climate in which to live. He tried Algiers, the south of France, the
Bahamas, the Bermudas, Central America, Lower California, Colorado, and
finally died in the Adirondack mountains, which he thought might allow
him, in the dry air, to safely winter there. He did not like Florida,
thought it was too damp, considered the southern part of California to be
subject to winds, took cold in Colorado, which hastened his death, and
finally considered that the northern climates were the most reliable. His
vital power was almost spent when he came to this conclusion.
I was recently talking to General Pike Graham, a retired officer of the
United States army and a native of Virginia, about the relative climate
of Europe and America. He said that he had spent within a very few years
three full winters abroad, and had tried almost all the resorts in the
South of Europe, and he considered that the United States was much better
situated for climate. He did not think Florida was a good climate, being
too low and subject to changes and to dampness, but regarded southwestern
Texas as perhaps the best he knew. I haw talked to other travelers who
consider the City of Mexico to have the best air they know of on the
continent.
It is of advantage to an invalid to have a resort from which the
surrounding world of men is attainable. That accounts for Fortress Monroe
in the winter, with probably an inferior climate, absorbing much of the
best travel to Florida. It is softer than any indentation to the north
of the Chesapeake, and can be reached by a husband, or brother, or wife,
from any of the great centers of the North in a very little time. The
same is the case with Chautauqua Lake; it is only a night from the East,
and a night and a day from the far West. A large portion of the American
people can visit it without taking rail at all, using the steam lines on
the St. Lawrence and the great lakes. It is especially a summer climate
and the foliage of western New York in the autumns is not equaled on the
globe, at least not in the temperate zones. The finest autumn tints I
ever recollect to have seen are in western New York, where the character
of the trees assimilates to the ardor of the foliage, and the maples and
poplars almost imitate the finery of the Indians who once dwelt in their
region.
The Western States do not possess the variety of the East in coasts,
hills, spas, and scenery; much of the Mississippi valley is limestone
hill or flat plain, bare of mountains, and the first cool and lovely spot
reached from the West is on the lofty headwaters of the Ohio, near Lake
Erie. Following the Lake Shore to the westward I do not know of a single
spot to be found like Chautauqua, though one should go as far as Duluth,
where I have been also in the time of its prosperity, about 1872; the
heat at Duluth, though so much farther to the north, was much greater
in midsummer than it is on the Chautauqua uplands. Indeed, the heat of
the American summer penetrates almost every resort, and I have known at
Saratoga some of the most stagnant days of my life. A perfectly cool
climate is not obtained along our coasts till one gets to New Brunswick,
about St. John, and the coolness there has the drawback of heavy fogs and
a moisture exceeding Ireland.
My brother, already referred to, possessed more special intelligence on
this subject than myself, and at the commencement of his sickness he
began a series of letters to the _Medical and Surgical Reporter_, where
I read at the outstart this sentence: “My languor and lassitude from May
until July was followed by a slight attack of laryngitis. I grew thinner
daily. A week in July at the high, dry country estate of a friend did
bring some increased strength and appetite, but a second week at Cape May
brought on a severe attack of bronchitis. Recovering partly from this,
two weeks were spent at Saratoga and Lake George with the effect of again
bringing me home with a bronchial attack, and the last straw was finally
attained by taking my boy to Atlantic City for his health. I had hardly
come within smell of the salt marshes at this place when my bronchial
trouble was brought back with redoubled intensity.”
He goes on to say that his doctor, Professor Da Costa, ordered him to
find a new climate at once, as a deposit had already made its appearance
in both lungs. This was just ten years ago, and in the month of October,
he says: “Of the many different medical friends who came to say good-bye
and add hearty wishes for my recovery, scarcely two united on the same
place as the one best suited for me to go to.”
My brother’s letters, continued for several months and written just
before his death, grappled with the question of a climate after severe
experience. He found Mentone “the most crowded of all places with
invalids, and the least deserving of patronage of any place long the
Riviera.” “If you get into a carriage in front of a hotel on a beautiful
sunshiny day you protest against taking an overcoat in the absolute
heat, but when you turn a corner into a shady street or get on the shady
side of a wall or hill and let the sun be temporarily obscured, you must
quickly draw close your overcoat and pull a robe over your lap. I do not
recommend Nice as a winter climate except by comparison, and I would
never halt on the north shore of the Mediterranean if it were in my power
to reach Egypt or Algeria.”
He kept a diary, wherever he went, of the condition of the weather, and
Europe is almost invariably written “cloudy,” “chilly,” “raw,” “showery,”
or “rain.” He thought much better of Algiers, where he stayed fifty-nine
days, but how few persons can afford to go to Algiers—“and even there,”
he says, “ten days were partially or wholly cloudy, and on eleven
days we had continuous rains or showers, one of the rainy days being
characterized by a smart hail storm.” This was between January and March.
Santa Barbara is probably the best indorsed wintering place on the coast
of California. I went ashore there from a ship, and found a small town,
partly of frame houses and partly of Mexican huts, with a dull mongrel
life, hardly relieved by an old mission house a mile or so in the rear
of the town; the invalids looked like banished people, and had then such
infrequent access to the outer world that their eyes seemed yearning
toward their homes in Chicago or elsewhere. The element of society and
of change and life is more necessary than medicine to a desponding and
invalid nature. That is the great trouble with the majority of American
resorts, which are neither large enough to accommodate the crowd in the
high season, nor near enough to the channels of travel in any season.
There can not be, for example, a more wretched place than the Hot Springs
of Arkansas, even in the height of the season, which is in late winter
and spring; the close ragged valley with a sewer running through the
middle of it, alternately a stench and deluge, and the series of raveled
hotels wherein gambling is the chief occupation, where the rain is
frequent and at times seems constant, and the natural life of the place
is hard and outlaw like, and it takes about twenty-four hours to get
anywhere in the current of mankind.
San Antonio, which has a good climate, has not a hotel fit for a
person to inhabit who is acquainted with the comforts of the table.
Though situated considerably inland, it is subject to what are called
“northers,” or cold storms, that often bring hail, and advance upon the
place with the rapidity of a spirit of ice and snow. Almost all those
southern resorts are too warm for summer tourists, and this is the case
at the Green Brier Sulphur Springs, notwithstanding its high altitude;
the nights are cold, but mid-day is often exhausting.
About Oakland, in Maryland, is a cool climate, and the summit there has
become something similar to Chautauqua Lake, having groups of hotels
about six miles apart, and between them in the glades is a kind of
religious camp settlement.
The interior of New York state, as at Cooperstown, is agreeable in the
nights, but the limestone soil retains a portion of its heat and the days
are often sultry.
The White Mountains have the disadvantage of remoteness from any
considerable centers of population and are not upon the main highways
of travel. It takes a whole day to go to the mountains from Boston, and
many of the resorts there are distant from the railroad, and must be
reached by livery teams, which slowly climb to the altitudes, and affect
the patience and also increase the cost of living. The days are often
very cold. I was in the White Mountains last summer, and undertook to
walk from my hotel down to the village of Franconia, in plain sight. I
generally found that the heat spoiled my linen and brought me back to the
hotel used up.
* * * * *
For my own part I am fully persuaded that the most powerful goddess,
and one that rules mankind with the most authoritative sway is Truth.
For though she is resisted by all, and ofttimes has drawn up against
her the plausibilities of falsehood in the subtlest forms, she triumphs
over all opposition. I know not how it is that she, by her own unadorned
charms, forces herself into the heart of man. At times her power is
instantly felt; at other times, though obscured for awhile, she at last
bursts forth in meridian splendor, and conquers by her innate force the
falsehood with which she has been oppressed.—_Polybius._