Is naturally a place of special interest in any watering place. Visitors are no sooner settled in their summer quarters than they become interested in the incomings and outgoings of their fellow men, watching eagerly if perchance any old acquaintance may turn up. The contrast between city and country life in this respect is noticable. Those who, amid the race for wealth in the cities, can scarcely afford a nod to intimate friends, here greet a slight acquaintance even with a friendliness and cordiality undreamed of in the busy town. The station at Saratoga is elegant and tasteful, facing an open square, adorned with fountain and shade trees. It is built of brick, with elaborate iron trimmings from the Corrugated Iron Company of Springfield, Mass. [Illustration: VIEW OF CONGRESS PARK.] The crowds are hastening away from it, and with them we will proceed towards The Village. Large enough to possess a fixed population of some 9,000, it has double, and perhaps treble, this number in the visiting season; with elegant and costly churches, mammoth hotels and metropolitan stores, affording everything desirable, from a paper of pins to the rarest diamonds and laces, it has been called "_rus in urbe_"--more properly, _urbs in rure_. The principal street is Broadway, miles in length, ample in breadth, and, for the most part, shaded with a double line of graceful elms. Its extremities are adorned with beautiful villas. The Fifth avenue of the place, where the handsomest residences are located, is Circular street, east of the Park. Beautiful dwellings may also be found on Lake avenue and Franklin street. The streets are thronged with a gay and brilliant multitude, engaged in riding, driving, walking, each enjoying to the utmost a facinating kind of busy idleness. But by the time the tourist has glanced at all this he will be thinking of clean napkins, and will be interested to know what may be afforded in the way of Accommodations for Man and Beast. About 15,000 visitors can at one time be quartered in the gay watering place, and consequently to pen up all the fashionable flock within the limits of so small a town, requires no little tact. During August, Saratoga is always full, crowded, squeezed. Saratoga has the largest and most extensive hotels in the world. There are in all from thirty to forty, and in addition to them numerous public and private boarding-houses accommodate large numbers of guests. Among the hotels, the gem of Saratoga, and one of the finest, if not _the finest_, hotel in this country is Congress Hall. [Illustration: CONGRESS HALL.]