and pensively imagining a meeting there, with songs out of the Moody and
Sankey book; and he did not tire of dropping into the reposeful
reception-room, where he never by any chance met anybody, and sitting
with the melodeon and big Bible Society edition of the Scriptures, and a
chance copy of the Christian at Play. These amusements were varied by
sympathetic listening to the complaints of the proprietor about the
vandalism of visitors who wrote with diamonds on the window-panes, so
that the glass had to be renewed, or scratched their names on the pillars
of the piazza, so that the whole front had to be repainted, or broke off
the azalea blossoms, or in other ways desecrated the premises. In order
to fit himself for a sojourn here, Mr. King tried to commit to memory a
placard that was neatly framed and hung on the veranda, wherein it was
stated that the owner cheerfully submits to all necessary use of the
premises, "but will not permit any unnecessary use, or the exercise of a
depraved taste or vandalism." There were not as yet many guests, and
those who were there seemed to have conned this placard to their
improvement, for there was not much exercise of any sort of taste. Of
course there were two or three brides, and there was the inevitable
English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter ram-roddy and
uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in response to a
gentleman who was giving her information about travel, constantly
ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, yas; ow, ow, ow, really!"

And there was the young bride from Kankazoo, who frightened Mr. King back
into his chamber one morning when he opened his door and beheld the
vision of a woman going towards the breakfast-room in what he took to be
a robe de nuit, but which turned out to be one of the "Mother-Hubbards"
which have had a certain celebrity as street dresses in some parts of the
West. But these gayeties palled after a time, and one afternoon our
travelers, with their vandalism all subdued, walked a mile over the rocks