A very few years ago a wide waste of marshy meadows, swamps we would call them, lay around and over the spot that now gathers and holds for the season the fashion and style and rank of the gayest European capitals,—the largest and most distinguished circle of “the upper classes” to be found at any fashionable resort in the world. It is a city of hotels, and these on a scale of elegance that is not surpassed. But between these hotels and the waters of health that first drew the crowds hither, are these original meadows, now covered with young woods, and intersected by numberless walks and drives, in which a stranger might easily be lost, and left to wander hours and hours without finding his way out. Beyond these shaded groves we come to the springs, several, with various properties, very kindly arranged to meet the many maladies of man, and all of them sufficiently disagreeable to be medicinal. Neatness, order, elegance reign everywhere. Around the springs, through the avenues overhung with venerable trees, along the rows of beautiful lodging-houses and residences of those who permanently pass the summer here, the quietness of private life rests with a grace and charm quite rare in a great watering-place. This gives to Homburg such an attraction that thousands of the quietest class of people in the world love to come here for refreshment and repose. They need not go into the Kursaal, though that word means cure-hall or cure-house. I would call it Kursaal, or curse-all, because it is the curse of all who are drawn into its vortex. It is a palace. In its extent, its proportions, and appointments, it is fit for a royal residence, all the arts of ornamentation being exhausted to make it a splendid temple of pleasure, instead of a hospital or asylum for the sick and suffering. This palace, with its broad piazzas looking upon beautiful gardens, where elegant women are sitting under the shade, with their books or fancy needle-work, while a German band fills the soft and fragrant atmosphere with delicious waves of music; this palace, with its concert-rooms and ball-rooms and reading-rooms, filled with all the choicest periodicals of all nations, which studious old men are diligently pondering; this palace, so still, so beautiful, so gorgeous in its decorations, and so well fitted to bear the inscription which Ptolemy Soter put upon his library at Alexandria, “The Medicine of the Soul,”—this palace was also the great gambling-house in Europe.