Unlike most American watering-places, Newport is not an aggregation of hotels and lodging-houses, but it is pre-eminently a gathering of the costliest and most elaborate suburban homes this country can show. Built upon the extensive space surrounding the older town, and between it and the ocean, south and east, modern Newport is a galaxy of large and expensive country-houses, each in an enclosure of lawns, flower-gardens and foliage, highly ornamental and exceedingly well kept. Many of them are spacious palaces upon which enormous sums have been expended; and in front of their lawns, for several miles along the winding brow of the cliffs that fall off precipitously to the ocean's edge, is laid the noted "Cliff Walk." This is a narrow footpath at the edge of the greensward that has the waves dashing against the bases of the rocks supporting it, while inland, beyond the lawns, are the noble palaces of Newport. Each is a type of different architecture, and no matter how grand and imposing, each is called a "cottage." The greatest rivalry has been shown in construction, and the styles cover all known methods of building--Gothic, Elizabethan, Tudor, Swiss, Flemish, French, with every sort of ancient house in Britain or Continental Europe, imitated and improved upon, and in some cases widely varying systems being condensed together. Some of these "cottages" have thus become piles of buildings, with all sorts of porticos, doorways, pavilions, dormers, oriels, bow-windows, bays and turrets, towers, chimneys, gambrel roofs and gables, the whole being charmingly elaborated into wide-spreading, imposing and sometimes astonishing houses. Occasionally the villa is elongated into the stable, in an extended house, which includes the family, horses, hounds, domestics and grooms, all living under the same roof. A low and rambling style of architecture, with many gables and prominent colors, is the favorite for various Newport cottages. To the southward of the town are the Ocean Avenue and Ocean Drive, skirting the whole lower coast of the island for some ten miles, and displaying fine marine views.