You see I am growing garrulous, and do not come to Saratoga by steam. But I did come, fresh from that triumph, and full of it. I had been the greatest man of the greatest day in a town not five hundred miles away, and could not but feel that my fame must have excited Saratoga. With what modest trembling I wrote my name in the office-book. The man scarcely looked at it, but wrote a number against it, shouted to the porter to take Mr. ----'s (excuse my name) luggage to No. 310, and I mechanically followed that functionary, and observed that not a single loiterer in the office raised his head at my name. But worse than that, the name seemed to be of no consequence. I was no longer Mr. ---- with "the valedictory addresses," &c, &c. (including the thousand eyes). I was merely No. 310--and you too have already observed, I am sure, wherever you are passing the summer, that you are not an individual at a Watering-Place. You lose your personal identity in a great summer hotel, as you would in a penitentiary; you are No. this or No. that. It is No. 310 who wishes his Champagne frappé. It is No. 310 who wishes his card taken to No. 320. It is No. 310 who goes in the morning, pays his bill, and hears, as the porter slings on his luggage and takes his shilling, "put No. 310 in order." This is one of the humiliating aspects of Watering-Place life. You are one of a mass, and distinguished by your number. Yet you can never know the mortifying ignominy of such treatment until it comes directly upon the glory of a commencement, at which you have absorbed all other individuality into yourself. I reached Saratoga and came down to dinner. I could not help laughing at the important procession of negro-waiters stamping in with the different courses, and concentrating attention upon their movements. I felt then, instinctively, how it is the last degree of vulgarity--that the serving at table instead of being noiseless as the wind that blows the ship along, is the chief spectacle and amusement at dinner. Dinner at Saratoga, or Newport, or Niagara is a grand military movement of black waiters, who advance, halt, load, present, and fire their dishes, and in which the elegant ladies and the elegant gentlemen are merely lay-figures, upon which the African army exercise their skill by not hitting or spilling. For the first days of my residence it was a quiet enjoyment to me to see with what elaborate care the fine ladies and gentlemen arrayed themselves to play their inferior parts at dinner. The chief actors in the ceremony--the negro waiters--ran, a moment before the last bell, to put on clean white jackets and when the bell rang, and the puppets were seated--fancying, with charming naïveté, that they were the principle objects of the feast--then thundered in the sable host and deployed right and left, tramping like the ghost in Don Giovanni, thumping, clashing, rattling, and all thought of elegance or propriety was lost in the universal tumult.