And there was the young bride from Kankazoo, who frightened Mr. King back into his chamber one morning when he opened his door and beheld the vision of a woman going towards the breakfast-room in what he took to be a robe de nuit, but which turned out to be one of the “Mother-Hubbards” which have had a certain celebrity as street dresses in some parts of the West. But these gayeties palled after a time, and one afternoon our travelers, with their vandalism all subdued, walked a mile over the rocks to the Kaaterskill House, and took up their abode there to watch the opening of the season. Naturally they expected some difficulty in transferring their two trunks round by the road, where there had been nothing but a wilderness forty years ago; but their change of base was facilitated by the obliging hotelkeeper in the most friendly manner, and when he insisted on charging only four dollars for moving the trunks, the two friends said that, considering the wear and tear of the mountain involved, they did not see how he could afford to do it for such a sum, and they went away, as they said, well pleased. It happened to be at the Kaaterskill House--it might have been at the Grand, or the Overlook--that the young gentlemen in search of information saw the Catskill season get under way. The phase of American life is much the same at all these great caravansaries. It seems to the writer, who has the greatest admiration for the military genius that can feed and fight an army in the field, that not enough account is made of the greater genius that can organize and carry on a great American hotel, with a thousand or fifteen hundred guests, in a short, sharp, and decisive campaign of two months, at the end of which the substantial fruits of victory are in the hands of the landlord, and the guests are allowed to depart with only their personal baggage and side-arms, but so well pleased that they are inclined to renew the contest next year. This is a triumph of mind over mind. It is not merely the organization and the management of the army under the immediate command of the landlord, the accumulation and distribution of supplies upon this mountain-top, in the uncertainty whether the garrison on a given day will be one hundred or one thousand, not merely the lodging, rationing and amusing of this shifting host, but the satisfying of as many whims and prejudices as there are people who leave home on purpose to grumble and enjoy themselves in the exercise of a criticism they dare not indulge in their own houses. Our friends had an opportunity of seeing the machinery set in motion in one of these great establishments. Here was a vast balloon structure, founded on a rock, but built in the air, and anchored with cables, with towers and a high pillared veranda, capable, with its annex, of lodging fifteen hundred people. The army of waiters and chamber-maids, of bellboys, and scullions and porters and laundry-folk,