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This was shortly before Christmas. When they got to Bethlehem, they found the place crowded with people who also came to enroll their names. They went to the inn or hotel to seek for lodging for the night. The hotels there were not like ours. They were simply large buildings with small rooms and no furniture; they were called caravansaries.

For the hotel was one of those great caravansaries popular with the returning miner. It received him and his gold dust in his worn-out and bedraggled working clothes, and returned him the next day as a well-dressed citizen on Montgomery Street.

Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-grass had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful White City had sprung up. It was Sunday morning.

I had found my hotel, in the first place, extremely entertaining the Croce di Malta, as it is called, established in a gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean harbour. It was the biggest house I had ever entered the basement alone would have contained a dozen American caravansaries.

On this, the thirteenth day of my journey, I reached Kottah. I was very well satisfied with my servants and driver, and indeed with the journey altogether! The owners of the caravansaries had not charged me more than a native; and had afforded me all the conveniences which the strict rules of religion allowed.

Bridges and caravansaries abounded; the latter, in the single province attached to its capital, amounted to 2,000. In Bactriana, the very ruins of Balkh extend for a circuit of 20 miles, and Sir A. Burns wound through three miles of them continuously.

She had, it was true, accepted doubtfully the pen he had offered. She had not been sufficiently prompted in relation to the ways of caravansaries; but her mind had been alert and receptive. Almost at once she had comprehended that she was expected to write down her name and address, which she did, in slanting cobwebby lettering, perhaps a trifle laboriously. Ruth Enschede, Hartford, Conn.

It happened to be at the Kaaterskill House it might have been at the Grand, or the Overlook that the young gentlemen in search of information saw the Catskill season get under way. The phase of American life is much the same at all these great caravansaries.

In the interval of waiting for his train he visited Bethlehem Street, with its mile of caravansaries, big boarding-houses, shops, and city veneer, and although he was delighted, as an American, with the "improvements" and with the air of refinement, he felt that if he wanted retirement and rural life, he might as well be with the hordes in the depths of the Adirondack wilderness.

By the strenuous labors described Kaotsou rendered his new capital easy of access from all quarters of the kingdom, while at frequent intervals along the great high-roads of the empire there were built post-houses, caravansaries, and other conveniences, so as to make travelling rather a pleasure than the severe task it formerly had been.