to the Kaaterskill House, and took up their abode there to watch the
opening of the season. Naturally they expected some difficulty in
transferring their two trunks round by the road, where there had been
nothing but a wilderness forty years ago; but their change of base was
facilitated by the obliging hotelkeeper in the most friendly manner, and
when he insisted on charging only four dollars for moving the trunks, the
two friends said that, considering the wear and tear of the mountain
involved, they did not see how he could afford to do it for such a sum,
and they went away, as they said, well pleased.

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. It seems to the writer,
who has the greatest admiration for the military genius that can feed and
fight an army in the field, that not enough account is made of the
greater genius that can organize and carry on a great American hotel,
with a thousand or fifteen hundred guests, in a short, sharp, and
decisive campaign of two months, at the end of which the substantial
fruits of victory are in the hands of the landlord, and the guests are
allowed to depart with only their personal baggage and side-arms, but so
well pleased that they are inclined to renew the contest next year. This
is a triumph of mind over mind. It is not merely the organization and
the management of the army under the immediate command of the landlord,
the accumulation and distribution of supplies upon this mountain-top, in
the uncertainty whether the garrison on a given day will be one hundred
or one thousand, not merely the lodging, rationing and amusing of this
shifting host, but the satisfying of as many whims and prejudices as
there are people who leave home on purpose to grumble and enjoy
themselves in the exercise of a criticism they dare not indulge in their