UNITED STATES. 147 
season in America, a traveller in the country must earn his nightly 
rest by daily toil; for the elements of repose come not in due 
course with the setting sun, as in Europe; and if he be one of 
those unhappy wights, whom the God of Sleep habitually forsakes, 
thrice pitiable is his doom during the hours of darkness. A host 
of little merry revellers, sworn foes to slumber and without sym- 
pathy for slumberers, people every twig of every tree and bush 
around his domicile, and with their untiring mirth dispel one of 
night’s most solemn but soothing attributes. A serenade of this 
description, at such a time, and with the thermometer at 85°, or 
near it, isno lullaby to fevered temples ; even should the mosquito 
not be hovering at hand, watching an opportunity of enjoying 
undisturbed his nocturnal banquet. In the towns, of course, these 
sources of discomfort are avoided, or much diminished, those — 
arising from the heat excepted, which, from the want of adaptation 
in the construction of the houses to mitigate the effect of a high 
temperature, is felt to be most oppressive by the generality of 
strangers, who are compelled, by the impossibility of procuring 
accommodation of a more private kind, to put up with the many 
inconveniences and deficiencies of an American hotel. Of these 
establishments, which so abound in every city, town, and village, 
throughout the republic, that it might be distinctively called the 
land of hotels, even the largest and best conducted in the principal 
cities, with the most imposing exteriors, fall short, in their internal 
arrangements, of our English ideas of comfort and retirement. 
In most, if not all, the provincial towns, and even in the capitals - 2 
of the larger states, the hotels, not excepting those of the better — 
class, are usually indifferent, and sometimes execrable, in spite 
of their palace-like fronts, and ad captandum appendages of pedi- 
ment-crowned columns and flights of stone or marble steps at the 
principal entrance, always in a state of filthiness beyond description 
from the ceaseless expectorations which defile both them and the 
halls and corridors to which they lead; whilst the long lines of — — 
sleeping apartments, the only asylum of quiet and retirement 
from the noise and bustle which pervade the ground and first floors, 
with their bare, white-washed walls and scanty furniture, cold and 
