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376  are taken to provide for them. The climatic relations of the American people are exactly the obverse of those of the Italian people. In Italy every preparation is made for summer and no preparation for winter; in America all the resources of architectural and mechanical ingenuity are turned to account for protection against a long season of frost and snow. In Italy a "cold snap" finds every one shivering and with no means of keeping warm; in America people can simply resign themselves to misery during a heated term. With the exception of the naturalized Germans, who have established a few beer-gardens in every large city, the Americans have not learned as yet to enjoy themselves in the open air like the people of the Continent.

The Americans know of only one means of making the summer heat endurable. This is to leave their homes and live in cottages or hotels by the seaside and in mountain resorts. The number of these places runs well up among the hundreds before those are exhausted which have either a State or a national reputation. Add to these the quiet, out-of-the-way nooks which a few families here and there have discovered, and the places of summer resort may be fairly called "innumerable." The few which are more or less known in England — as Saratoga, Long Branch, or Newport — occupy no such relative position in this country as do the great watering-places of England and the Continent in Europe. So many others dispute their precedence, or at least attract attention and patronage away from them, that none of them enjoys anything approaching a monopoly nor concentrates so much of the national wealth and fashion as to make it imposing like Brighton, or finished and attractive like Wiesbaden. Newport, perhaps, is as charming a resort, and as magnificently built up, according to the number of its summer population, as any in the world; but it is simply a distant suburb of New York, Boston, and Providence. Aside from the old commercial town of about ten thousand inhabitants, almost as venerable in its appearance as if it were a neighbor of Coventry, Newport is merely a city of private villas, Saratoga, on the contrary, is entirely devoted to transient guests drawn there by the temptations of a short fashionable season and the special attractions of two "racing weeks." The guest of an hotel in Newport has a doubtful social position, except so far as he may have personal friends among the "cottagers." The latter take absolute precedence, and the occupants of private lodging-houses rank next. At Saratoga the few dwellers in private cottages have no recognized existence, except as they appear at the hotels or attract the attention of hotel guests. At none of the American watering-places are there those distinctions of classes according to the season of the year which are characteristic of Brighton and Scarborough in England. There is only one season at any of them, and all kinds of visitors go at the same time. It would puzzle an English visitor, indeed, to see any lines of demarcation between the social "classes" as they gather at these resorts. No one can do so except a skilled American. In a country like this, where social classes have scarcely any basis except personal taste — where two or more classes may claim precedence, with no one to decide between them and with no recognized standard on which to found a decision — where no settled traditions exist and there are no letters patent from the government — where the term "good society" means nothing in particular and everything in general — it requires a very learned eye to mark the distinctions which really do exist. An English lady recently insisted, in conversation with myself, that class-distinctions were very decided in American society. She was right. But it is nevertheless true that neither she nor any other stranger has the slightest tangible means of learning what the distinctions are or where they begin and end. When our comic writer, Nasby, wrote a letter to show the advantages of the Alaskan climate, during our negotiations with Russia, he remarked that the isothermal line went "corkscrewing" up among the parallels of latitude, and that strawberries flourished all the year round on one side of it and icebergs on the other. The corkscrew may be taken as a fair illustration of the boundaries which mark the various classes of American society. If this is true even when society is at home, in our cities, the truth is more noticeable when all the elements of our society mingle together at a summer resort. Except so far as he depends on his letters of introduction, an English gentleman visiting one of them cannot do better than be guided by his personal taste in his judgment of the people he meets. If he is himself a man of refinement he may be tolerably certain, following this rule, that the people he likes best and becomes best acquainted with belong to "good society" in this country. If he is not himself 