The Hotel Helicon stood on a great rock that far out into a sea of air whose currents and filled a wide, wild valley in the midst of our southern mountain region. It was a new hotel, built by a Cincinnati man who founded his fortune in natural gas , and who had conceived the bright thought of making the house famous at the start by a stroke of rare liberality.  
Viewing the large building from any favorable point in the valley, it looked like a huge white bird sitting with outstretched wings on the gray rock far up against the tender blue sky. All around it the forests were thick and green, the ravines deep and gloomy and the rocks tumbled into fantastic heaps. When you reached it, which was after a whole day of hard zig-zag climbing, you found it a rather plain three-story house, whose broad were worried with a mass of jig-saw fancies and whose windows glared at you between wide open green Venetian . Everything look new, almost raw, from the of fresh-cut trees on the lawn and the rope swings and long benches, upon which the paint was scarcely dry, to the floor of the halls and the cedar-fragrant hand-rail of the stairway.
 
There were springs among the rocks. Here the water out with a red gleam of iron , there it sparkled with an excess of carbonic acid, and yonder it bubbled up all the more and clear on account of the offensive sulphuretted hydrogen it was bringing . Masses of fern, great cushions of cool and of blooming and vines fringed the sides of the little ravines down which the spring-streams sang their way to the silver thread of a river in the valley.
 
It was altogether a dizzy , a strange, , out-of-the-way spot for a summer hotel. You reached it all out of breath, confused as to the points of the compass and disappointed, in every sense of the word, with what at first glance struck you as a , empty, raw, vulgar, loud—a great trap into which you had been by an hand-bill! Hotel Helicon, as a name for the place, was considered a happy one. It had come to the , as if in a dream, one day as he sat smoking. He slapped his with his hand and sprang to his feet. The word that went so with hotel, as he fancied, had no special meaning in his mind, for the gas man had never been guilty of classical lore-study, but it furnished a taking .