In Mr. Willis's "letters from an invalid," he described the beautiful walks and drives in the neighborhood where he spent his days and the description brought summer visitors seeking for board. Every room was occupied and hundreds went away for lack of accommodation. The next season saw new houses built and others were enlarged, and there seemed no limit to our prosperity. A paper published here in 1874 contained the advertisements of twenty-five houses that were public boarding-houses, besides all that were accommodated in private families. Many who came as visitors purchased building sites and erected summer homes. One of these was Mr. Harvey, of Brooklyn, who built Homeland, adjoining Idlewild. Mr. E. A. Mattheissen secured the next site where Mattheissen Park is now. Mr. Solomon, of New York, chose Land's End for his beautiful home. Mr. Bellows's residence was on Bayview Avenue. Mr. James Stillman and his mother each have a summer cottage here. BOARDING-HOUSES. Among all the houses opened for guests the Mountain House stood first, from the fact of its position twelve hundred feet above tide-water in the heart of pine woods, where the visitors found health as well as recreation. The building itself was also attractive. In the early sixties Dr. Champlin, who had been traveling in the East, saw some marvelous cures performed on consumptive patients by the use of kourmis. Property on the mountain was at this time nearly all held by two families--John Losee Wood and Christian Vought; so when the doctor erected two houses as a sanitarium, no one objected. The architecture was oriental--windows and doors were surmounted by round arches, and the second story was built over the broad piazza which surrounded it on three sides. A number of goats were installed in what is now the Chalet across the road, and two physicians, Doctors Pellatier and Boyd, had charge of the houses, but the enterprise was a failure and it became a boarding-house, numbering among its patrons some of the most exclusive families of New York and Philadelphia.