Upon entering the building, we find ourselves in a spacious, handsome,
well-arranged, and well-furnished hotel. The musical click of
billiard-balls, and the distant thunder of the bowling-alley, salute
the ear; one of the inmates may be performing brilliantly on the piano,
or trying over a new piece for next Sunday on the cabinet organ in the
temporary chapel. The billiard-room, we soon discover, contains three
tables. There is a reading-room always open, in which the principal
periodicals of both continents, and plenty of newspapers, are
accessible to all the patients. A small library, which ought to be a
larger one, is open at a certain hour every day. A conservatory is near
completion, and there is a garden of ten acres near by in which a
number of the inmates may usually be seen at work. A croquet-ground is
not wanting, and the apparatus of cricket is visible in one of the
halls. The chapel is still far from being finished, but enough is done
to show that it will be elegant and inviting soon after the next
instalment of excise-money comes in. The dining-room is lofty and
large, as indeed are all the public rooms. The private rooms are equal,
both in size and furniture, to those of good city hotels. The
arrangements for warming, lighting, washing, bathing, cooking, are such
as we should expect to find in so stately an edifice. We have not yet
reached the point when housework will do itself; but in great
establishments like this, where one man, working ten minutes an hour,
warms two or three hundred rooms, menial labor is hopefully reduced. In
walking about the wide halls and airy public apartments, the visitor
sees nothing to destroy the impression that the building is a very
liberally arranged summer hotel. To complete the illusion, he will
perhaps see toddling about a lovely child with its beautiful mother,
and in the large parlor some ladies visiting inmates or officers of the
institution. The table also is good and well served. A stranger, not
knowing the nature of the institution, might, however, be puzzled to
decide whether it is a hotel or a college. No one, it is true, ever saw
a college so handsomely arranged and provided; but the tone of the
thing is college-like, especially when you get about among the rooms of
the inmates, and see them cramming for next Monday's debate, or writing
a lecture for the Asylum course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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