No, it is a melancholy misnomer. To call these gay summer courts of Bacchus and Venus Watering-Places, is like the delightful mummery of the pastoral revels of the king in the old Italian romance, who attired himself as an abbot, and all his rollicking court as monks and nuns, and shaping his pavilion into the semblance of a monastery, stole, from contrast, a sharper edge for pleasure. I must laugh when you call Saratoga, for instance, a Watering-Place; because there, this very summer, I was intoxicated with that elixir of life, which young men do not name, and which old men call love. Let me tell you the story; for, if your eye chances to fall upon this page while you are loitering at one of those pleasant places, you can see in mine your own experience, and understand why Homer is so intelligible to you. Are you not all the time in the midst of an Iliad? That stately woman who is now passing along the piazza is beautiful Helen, although she is called Mrs. Bigge in these degenerate days, and Bigge himself is really the Menelaus of the old Trojan story, although he deals now in cotton. Paris, of course, is an habitué of Saratoga in the season, goes to Newport in the middle of August, and always wears a mustache. But Paris is not so dangerous to the connubial felicity of Menelaus Bigge, as he was in the gay Grecian days. Now what I say is this, that you who are swimming down the current of the summer at a Watering-Place, are really surrounded by the identical material out of which Homer spun his Iliad--yes, and Shakspeare his glowing and odorous Romeo and Juliet--only it goes by different names at Saratoga, Newport, and Niagara. And to point the truth of what I say, I shall tell you my little story, illustrative of summer life, and shall leave your wit to define the difference between my experience and yours. It is of the simplest kind, mark you, and "as easy as lying." I left college, in the early summer, flushed with the honors of the valedictory. It was in one of those quiet college towns which are the pleasantest spots in New England, that I had won and worn my laurels. After four years--so long in passing, such a swift line of light when passed--the eagerly-expected commencement day arrived. It was the greatest day in the year in that village, and I was the greatest man of the day.