Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1888 — SUMMER-RESORT NOTES. [ARTICLE]

SUMMER-RESORT NOTES.

Boston Tra* script., A pleasant way of spending the summer has been devised by a member of the Harvard faculty at Canobie lake. He has a convenjent cottage, built on a floating j*aft consisting of fifty-three empty oil casks. The dwelling*is towed about the lake wherever its owner desires to go. The Hotel Kaaterskill, among the Catskill mountains, New York, issues a pretty weekly publication from its office full of mountain notes and tourist personals. The Kaaterskill claims to be a sort of Saratago on a mountain top. Its park includes the far-famed , Kaaterskill Falls and Sunset Rock, and the drives are unsurpassed. •’ A Massachusetts man has bought ninety acres of land at Islesborough,near Turtle Head, and is founding a new* summer resort, which he calls Naples, which overlooks a distinctively New England harbor, bearing the name of “Bay of Naples.” The site happens to be a good one, and the blocks and streets have already been laid out by an expert civil engineer. The season at the various White mountain resorts has opened slowly. The number of arrivals is comparatively small, and probably a week will yet elapse before a dozen of the mountain hotels are crowded. The number of advance engagements for August, however is sufficiently encouraging to justify landlords in predicting a prosperous season.

The view from Carter Dome, writes a tourist in Among the Clouds, is one of the finest in the AVliite mountains. It is the only summit that is round like the top of a symmetrical head. It is covered with fir scrub, and the only lookout is from a tripod which the woodman’s ax has erected for that purpose. It is not a place where you could easily speiTil the night, becaiisethere is no water to be had, but for a mid-day outlook the the view is incomparably beautiful. ' " !

Newport summer residents are much put out by the way their interests are osrved by" the local authorities. The streets are not properly watered, they complain, and the roadways are not in as good shape as they should be to suit the feet of their expensive horse-flesh, and then tradesmen gouge them on every opportunity. The local business men w’ill suffer, as the cottagers swear that they will order all the goods they can from their winter homes rather than purchase them in a place where they feel that their eoming is not appreciated. '■The cottage at Long Branch which was made sti famous by the death of a President within its walls has not been changed in the least since his death. It has not even received a new coat of phint, and the dull wood color and red trimmings are becoming duller every day. The cottage is at present occupied by C. E. Sands, of New York, and his family. The lawn surrounding it is well kept, arid the old road, on which hundreds of willing hands labored with all their might in putting down the ties and rails over which the wounded President’s car was rolled, is in excellent condition. The Adirondacks proper, writes a visitor, are a disappointment. They are good, round family mountains from a distance, but the forests are not grand anywhere, and the treatment of the trees in “barking,” which leaves them scorched and dead, gives them a ghastly aspect and along the base of the mountains the seried ranks of pines and firs struggling upward for light betray skeletons below most unlovely. The wildness is gone, the clearings up the slopes present a spectacle of stumps, trunks and huge loots like the bones of .saurtans. They are not picturesque save in spots.