Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to
the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a
veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore
of a continent; and when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda
to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St.
Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length,
but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy
takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In
like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I
am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with
four or five persons.
They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious
that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and
I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected
themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of
rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with
its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black
waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that
impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in
greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was
peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the
tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle
of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling
and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring
in its harness, and hailing Cæsar with the warlike devotion inspired by
a munificent donative.
In the early morning there was a hardly less powerfull impression of
numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of
some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others
parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms, and
mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk-bearing
trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble
clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the
fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued
controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all
these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves
in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing
influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was
nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and
the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred
together.