world, and Mrs. March is of the same mind about it. We like all the
waters, and drink them without regard to their different properties;
but we rather prefer the Congress spring, because it is such a
pleasant place to listen to the Troy military band in the afternoon,
and the more or less vocal concert in the evening. All the Saratoga
world comes and goes before us, as we sit there by day and by night,
and we find a perpetual interest in it. We go and look at the deer
(a herd of two, I think) behind their wire netting in the southward
valley of the park, and we would feed the trout in their blue tank
if we did not see them suffering with surfeit, and hanging in
motionless misery amid the clear water under a cloud of bread
crumbs. We are such devotees of the special attractions offered
from time to time that we do not miss a single balloon ascension or
pyrotechnic display. In fact, it happened to me one summer that I
studied so earnestly and so closely the countenance of the lady who
went up (in trunk-hose), in order to make out just what were the
emotions of a lady who went up every afternoon in a balloon, that
when we met near the end of the season in Broadway I thought I must
have seen her somewhere in society, and took off my hat to her (she
was not at the moment in trunk-hose). We like going about to the
great hotels, and sponging on them for the music in the forenoon; we
like the gaudy shops of modes kept by artists whose addresses are
French and whose surnames are Irish; and the bazaars of the
Armenians and Japanese, whose rugs and bric-a-brac are not such
bargains as you would think. We even go to the races sometimes; we
are not sure it is quite right, but as we do not bet, and are never
decided as to which horse has won, it is perhaps not so wrong as it
might be.

Somehow I could not predicate these simple joys of the people I have