Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/529

 belief is not easy in such waters; but a certain fountain of strength when rightly chosen and rightly used. The clientèle of Luxeuil is mostly composed of women and of young girls who are suffering from one, or more than one, of the protean forms of anaemia. I speak from my own observation when I say that relief is certain in cases of this nature, and that cure is frequent.

But the caution can not be too often repeated that cure or even relief, at Luxeuil, or at any other mineral spring, can only be expected when the right patient goes to the right spring. I would not send a scrofulous patient, for instance, to Luxeuil; Salins is the place for him, and for the cure of the particular form of anaemia from which he suffers. Even among the cases of nervous anaemia, with the resulting train of special symptoms to which I have alluded, there are some that should seek more strongly tonic waters than those of Luxeuil. If the patient will have himself rightly directed, by competent medical advice, to the springs that he requires, and if then he will go to these and no other, and there take the local treatment that he requires from the local physician—as at Luxeuil, from the highly accomplished Dr. Champouillon, or from either of his resident colleagues, Drs. Gauthier, Bertrand, or Paris—he will not regret the passing of three weeks in this health-giving place. I should add that the society is mostly French; and that the guest has to choose between furnished apartments, which are very comfortable and moderate in price, and the various hotels of the place. I found the Hôtel des Thermes comfortable, clean, and rejoicing in a pretty court-yard, where the birds sang all the morning; and it is a pleasure to record, though in a language that she does not know, and in words which she will probably never see, the courtesy with which the hostess of that hotel welcomed the present writer during his sojourn, last August, in the pleasant town of Luxeuil.

3. a little to the east of Luxeuil, is the last French station toward the new Alsatian frontier. It is a quiet place, in the heart of beautiful mountains, which tower on every side; in the green valley below the establishment the Moselle slips quietly seaward from its sources in the Col de Bussang, near at hand. The mountain itself is pierced by a long tunnel, emerging from the eastward end of which you come suddenly upon the reft provinces, and see the uniform of the German forest-guards upon the highway.

The hotel stands alone upon a beautiful hill-side, a mile away from the ancient village; it is at an elevation of 2,188 feet above sea-level, in the very heart of the mountains; and, from every window of the large, quiet, clean, new building, the views are exquisite. The hill slope that sweeps far upward behind it is a mountain-pasture or Alp, where shepherd-boys tend the cattle throughout the cool summer nights. There is a Swiss air about the place: the scenery, if less grand than that of the French and Swiss Jura, is very beautiful; and