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Updated: July 8, 2025
It is conducive to comfort to approach these resorts during the last stage, unless, of course, they happen to be those ephemeral caravansaries which close in confusion on the flight of the crowd; they are never comfortable.
Perhaps the most melancholy spectacle offered to us in our short sojourn in this pilgrimage, where the roads are so dusty and the caravansaries so ill provided, is the credulity of this pursuit.
From them it came, in 1865, into the possession of Stebbins Hitchcock Dumas, who, nineteen years before, had commenced hotel life at the Phenix, in Concord. Under Mr. Dumas' management the house has grown steadily in size as well as in popularity, until to-day it ranks as one of the great seaside caravansaries of the Atlantic coast.
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.
Disconsolately, because he knew that he must dine; and dining in that hotel was no venture. It was one of his favorite caravansaries, and so silent and swift would be the service and so delicately choice the food, that he regretted the hunger that must be appeased by the "dead perfection" of the place's cuisine. Even the music there seemed to be always playing da capo.
I have heard him name in order all the hotels on Broadway, beginning at the lower end and coming up as far as hotels exist, branching off upon the parallel and cross streets where there were noted caravansaries, and connecting every name with an event of importance, or with the life and fortunes of some noted man who had been guest at that particular inn.
The consul was already familiar with them, as indeed were most of the civilized world, for it seemed that all roads at certain seasons led out of and returned to St. Kentigern as a point in a vast circle wherein travelers were sure to meet one another again, coming or going, at certain depots and caravansaries with more or less superiority or envy.
Such are the Hygieia at Old Point Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton Roads, where the "Merrimac" wrought devastation to the vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret-ship "Monitor;" the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, or the population of a small town, while the three largest have together room for five thousand people; the hotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and aristocracy of the South, and still furnishing the eligible stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners; the Stockbridge Inn in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet high; the colossal Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen on the tenth floor; and the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and resonant central court.
My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated.
Perhaps the most melancholy spectacle offered to us in our short sojourn in this pilgrimage, where the roads are so dusty and the caravansaries so ill provided, is the credulity of this pursuit.
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