Everybody knows that a mountain hotel has no local color, no sympathy with its environment, no gift of making its guests feel that they are anywhere in particular. It is all very delightful to be held aloft on the shoulder of a giant almost within reach of the sky; but the charm of the thing is not referable to any definite, visible cause, such as one readily bases one's love of the sea-side on, or such as accounts for our delight in the life of a great city. No matter how fine the effect of clouds and peaks and sky and gorge, no matter how pure and exhilarating the air, or how blue the filmy deeps of distance, or how mossy the rocks, or how sweet the water, or how cool the wooded vales, the hotel stands there in an indefinite way, with no _raison d'etre_ visible in its make-up, but with an obvious impudence gleaming from its windows. One cannot deport one's self at such a place as if born there. The situation demands--nay, exacts behavior somewhat special and peculiar. No lonely island in the sea is quite as isolated and out of the world as the top of any mountain, nor can any amount of man's effort soften in the least the savage individuality of mountain scenery so as to render those high places familiar or homelike or genuinely habitable. Delightful enough and fascinating enough all mountain hotels surely are; but the sensation that living in one of them induces is the romantic consciousness of being in a degree "out of space, out of time." No doubt this feeling was heightened and intensified in the case of the guests at Hotel Helicon who were enjoying the added novelty of entire freedom from the petty economies that usually dog the footsteps and haunt the very dreams of the average summer sojourner. At all events, they were mostly a light-hearted set given over to a freedom of speech and action which would have horrified them on any lower plane. Scarcely had Gaspard Dufour passed beyond sight down the ravine in search of a trout-brook, than he became the subject of free discussion. Nothing strictly impolite was said about him; but everybody in some way expressed amazement at everybody's ignorance of a man whose importance was apparent and whose name vaguely and tauntingly suggested to each one of them a half-recollection of having seen it in connection with some notable literary sensation. "Is there a member of the French institute by the name of Dufour?" inquired R. Hobbs Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his heavy brows. "I am sure not," said Hartley Crane, "for I met most of the members when I was last at Paris and I do not recall the name." "There goes that Bourbon again," muttered Laurens Peck, the critic; "if one should mention Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal acquaintance with him!"