William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

[328] the words tavern and hotel, as savouring of bad old times, when every man might drink himself into a mad-house and his children into a jail. Our tavern is a house. I use the form guest-house from the close resemblance of my lodgings, in the way of meat and drink, to a guest-house on the Dwina and the Nile. It is a water-drinking house. Among the merits of the place, put out on cards to catch the eyes of tourists in the Vermont uplands, these two virtues are set forth: first there is dry air to breathe, and next there is good water to drink. Elsewhere one hostelry is famous for trout, a second for terrapin, a third for madeira, a fourth for champagne. Down South no hostelry has ever yet thought of advertising the quality of its pump. But in St. Johnsbury the well-spirits reign. An American poet of another mind has sung:

If ere I kneel me down to pray

My face shall turn towards St. Peray. But such a poet would persuade no man to follow his lead on Sleepers' Creek. Though lodging in the rooms which echoed to the mirth of Captain Barney, we are now the votaries of a severer saint than St. Peray.