Page:Portraits of Places (London, Macmillan and Co., 1883).djvu/338

 being transmuted into fact. There is an essential indignity in indefiniteness; you cannot allow for accidents and details until you have seen them. They give more to the imagination than they receive from it. I frankly admit, therefore, that the Saratoga of reality is a much more satisfactory place than the all-too-primitive Elysium I had constructed. It is indeed, as I say, immensely different. There is a vast number of brick—nay, of asphalt—sidewalks, a great many shops, and a magnificent array of loafers. But what indeed are you to do at Saratoga—the morning draught having been achieved—unless you loaf? "Que faire en un gîte à moins que l'on ne songe?" Loafers being assumed, of course shops and sidewalks follow. The main avenue of Saratoga does not scruple to call itself Broadway. The untravelled reader may form a very accurate idea of it by recalling as distinctly as possible, not indeed the splendours of that famous thoroughfare, but the secondary charms of the Sixth Avenue. The place has what the French would call the "accent" of the Sixth Avenue. Its two main features are the two monster hotels which stand facing each other along a goodly portion of its course. One, I believe, is considered much better than the other,—less of a monster and more of a refuge,—but in appearance there is little choice between them. Both are immense brick structures, directly on the crowded, noisy street, with vast covered piazzas running along the façade, supported by great iron posts. The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly informed, is the largest "in the world." There are a number of objects in Saratoga, by the