N E W YQR] DIVISION - O'Ryan's Roughnecks

3 GAS ATTACK
"ASHEVILLE."
(Concluded from page 3)
Asheville Appetites.
Leff and I will think about the
we had that Sunday morning, when we
over in France, and the thought alone
nourish and sustain us.
breakfast
are
will
They brought us a
menu like a mail order catalogue, and, like
gallant soldiers, we didn't duck a detail on
the list from strawberries, through eggs,
through steak, through wheat cakes until
we wound up with great tankards of
coffee.
It was the squarest meal we had ever
directed an enveloping movement at. But
that is the way Asheville air affects you.
You can't help eating—especially as the
hotels are mostly on the American plan.
Eats
with
The Inn.
After breakfast, Leff and I floated up
steaming
toward
Sunset Mountain, to where the celebrated
Grove Park Inn rises like some redroofed
monastery.
The Inn is monastic only
in its rough-hewn stone exterior and the
simplicity of its lines. It is made of great
boulders, cobble-rocks, hunks of stone,
thrown together by the gods of the Mountains.
Inside, there is nothing suggesting
hair-cloth shirts of penance, black bread
or anything monastic. All is luxury and
gayety. The Great Room, which seems to
cover acres, is supported by square pillars
of rough stone. It is lighted with great
bronzed dishes of light.
To go up in the elevator,
you enter what appears to be a stone
chimney. There is a genuine moonshine
still on exhibition in one nook. It was dormant.
We saw some of the bed-rooms, which
the manager has mercifully left
by the usual hotel pictures.
unadorned
We missed the
hotel art; we missed "Meditation," showing
a gawky female
in a Mother Hubbard,
sitting in a boat and staring at the
water;
we missed The Horse Fair; we missed the
picture of the St. Bernard who has just
saved the child, and who has "such an intelligent
expression."
Asheville Water.
To walk about the Inn is a liberal
education
in literature as well as in deep-breathing.
Some literary person has sprinkled
the stones with aphorisms and epigrams,
which peep out at one from unexpected
places.
Leff immediately wrote a little verse to
go on a rock but the manager wouldn't
promise to have it painted on. It went,
"The rose is red,
The violet's blue,
The air is pure,
The water, too."
The water, by the way, is the dampest,
most delicious water ever. Asheville, which
is ordinarily not inclined to talk about itself,
admits that only one microbe has been
found in the Asheville water since 1896—
and he was a good little microbe, who died
of lonesomeness. The list of things that
aren't in the water but which might be,
reads like the pharmacopoeia. It is very
consoling to know that the fluid with which
you are liberally irrigating your system
hasn't a trace of nux vomica, exopthalmia
or ars poetica in it.
A fine golf course stretches out in the
front yard of the Inn. We didn't dare play
for Leff felt so strong that he was afraid
of beaning one of the boys in Spartanburg
with a massie shot.
The Quaint Manor.
We strode back down the hill, passing the
charming Manor, on the way. The Manor is
an "English Inn in America" and has a
quaint atmosphere about it. A comfortable
place, the Manor. You stroll in and out as
if you lived there. No Turk tries to pry you
lose from your hat or your bag. No brazen
lunged youngster bellows "Mr. Blevitch,
Mr. Ummpph, Mr. Wafff, Mr. Blevitch, etc."
in your ear. Just to go inside and sit near
the open fire rests you.
Leff and I went back to the Battery Park
Hotel, and plied a wicked knife and fork.
We left at half past three for Spartanburg
on the train, and had a picturesque ride
through the mountains.
Even a Private Can Do It.
The trip doesn't cost much. You can get
a good room and three of the finest meals
you ever surrounded for five dollars a day.
The railroad fare is a couple of dollars. The
air is free.
coming miles to sniff.
And it is the air that is worth
Once you get up to Asheville, which is a
modern city of 30,000, there are many
to amuse yourself.
ways
You can get an auto for
three dollars an hour and drive to Biltmore,
or through the mountains to Esmerelda,
Hickory Nut Gap, Bat Cave, Waynesville
and the other delightful spots that dot that
region.
Or you can rent a horse and ride
through the trails of pines.
on every night at one
There's a dance
of the hotels, which
1
have big ball rooms, and good music—and—•
some girls. Asheville is a noted wintersummer
resort for Northern people,
especially
New Yorkers, and Leff and I saw some
ladies down there that made us weep on
each other's shoulders out of pure homesickness.
Asheville has an enterprising Board of
Trade of which Mr. Buckner is the dynamo.
Mr. Buckner is loath to talk about the
charms of Asheville. Oh, very loath. He
started in by telling us the story of the
Asheville man. who enlisted in the Heavenly
army, and then asked to be transferred from
Heaven to Asheville. The man's wish
seemed perfectly natural to Mr. Buckner.
Mr. Buckner, Booster.
I've seen a few boosters.
I knew a Seattle
man who, back in 1912, used to take
walks in the country around Boston and
carve on every prominent rock he came to,
"Seattle—Bigger than New York in 1915";
I have known Californians who believed
that anyone who wasn't a native son was
probably a moron. But they were knockers
and calamity howlers compared to N. Buckner,
Esq., of Asheville, North Carolina. Incidentally,
Asheville has a community advertising
tax, so all the people help spread
the good news about the water and the air.
The American Simla.
You remember Simla, in Kipling's stories
of English army life in India. Simla Is the
city in the mountains where officers send
their wives and families, while they are at
their work in various Indian garrisons. It
is a sort of carnival city—a place for rest
and a good time. Leff and I decided that
Asheville would make a good Simla for
Camp Wadsworth. Cottages may be had
furnished or unfurnished and week-ending
there is quite feasible. By motor or rail it
is but three and a half hours up there. You
can get a motor car to take a party up
there for $35, which isn't so much if you
split it seven ways—and the ride is gorgeous.
Asheville is a good place to know
about.
Better try an ozone jag up there in the Land
of the Sky sometime.