Summer Resorts

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SUMMER RESORTS.

Among other results of the late commercial revulsion, it has disabled many families who have been in the habit of making expensive summer trips from indulging in their usual luxury this season, and prevented no small number of the beau monde¹ from maintaining their costly sea and rural establishments. The people are getting tired, too, of the extortion practiced at the more famous places of summer resort, where the devoted traveller is made to pay the highest possible price for the poorest possible accommodation, to say nothing of the protean forms of dissipation which have increased, of late, to such an extent as to make a season at Newport or Saratoga rather more deleterious in its effects upon the health and morals than the winter in town.

Accordingly we find that a sudden affection for country cousins has sprung up among the fashionables, and rural farm-houses are more honored by their presence than they have been, for years. The aristocracy have found out that the beautiful and renovating influences of nature may be obtained in many localities that have not yet been waited upon by the devotees of fashion, and the fathers and mothers of our metropolitan localities, in consequence, are taking their children to the sequestered regions where they can enjoy domestic comfort and leisure at a rate less exhaustive of purse and bodily and mental health. The elite have found out that there are places that have not yet been placed upon the fashionable catalogue where they can receive the “sweet influences” of the season without exorbitant charges and their concomitants.

We are glad to see a return to sense and reason, from whatever cause it had originated. The harpies of the watering places were coining fortunes out of their visitants and it was time that their rapacity received a check. Let our citizens who are accustomed to the recuperative influence of the summer-resorts during the ‘heated term,’ take only the sensible course, and instead of aiding to swell the plethoric coffers of individuals who systematically neglect the interests and convenience of the public, locate themselves during the dog-days in the beautiful and picturesque regions of our own State, as yet unknown to fame, save as the artist’s taste for the picturesque has disclosed them. This summer, the public places of resort, if we are not mistaken, will go a begging, and the modest merit of the far inland paradises will be appreciated.

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