Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may have grown desolate or deserted--the buildings of the White Sulphur and the Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the White Mountains, the Cattskills and the Alleghanies, of the high, pure air and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,--all have been, with the exception of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring, button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the beach--on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars. Add to all this the rise of exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold