  The question "where to spend the Summer?" is usually discussed by paterfamilias, anxious mammas and uneasy children long before the summer solstice drives them from the pent-up confines of the busy metropolis to the pure air and quite recreation of country life. Many will visit the seaside, some will climb the mountains or explore the forests. Fashion, in most instances, determines the place of resort, and has fixed on certain localities, or courts of its acknowledged leaders, where not to have been seen at least is to have been buried for the season. One place has held through the many years the highest rank, both from intrinsic merit, and from an unfluctuating devotion of the fashionable world, and has been aptly termed "The Queen of American Watering Places." The village of Saratoga, where dwells the benign goddess Hygeia, in the midst of her far-famed waters of life and health, is pleasantly situated within the heart of a broad stretch of varied table-land, in the upper part and near the eastern boundary of New York. The HistoryOf this fashionable resort embraces a century. The muse of history has marked the spot with one of her red battleflags, ROUTES TO LAKE GEORGE. ROUTES TO LAKE GEORGE. The first white visitor who is known to have drank from these "rivers of Pactolus" is no less a distinguished person than Sir Wm. Johnson, Bart., who was conducted hither, in 1767, by his Mohawk friends. At that early day America could boast of little in the way of aristocracy, and it was not till 1803 that the career of Saratoga, as a fashionable watering place, was inaugurated. In this year, when the village consisted of only three or four cabins, Gideon Putnam opened the Union Hotel, and displayed his primitive sign of "Old Put and the Wolf." It was Putnam's ambition, when a boy even, to build him a great house, and in his time the Union Hotel, then 70 feet long, seemed to him doubtless comparatively as large as the present Grand Union seems to us. It is not necessary for us to follow Saratoga through its misfortunes and its successes, its fires and its improvements, until it has reached its present reputation and attractiveness. Year after year the water wells up its sparkling currents; year after year a little paint and plaster new-decks the great caravansaries; year after year belles blush and sigh away the summer, or, linking their destinies, rejoice or repine at leisure; and year after year, for a short four months of sequence, the little town swarms and rejoices with merry glee. |
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