There have been lavished upon these palaces of Newport, in construction and decoration, large portions of the greatest incomes of the multi-millionaires of New York and Boston, and hither they hie to enjoy the summer and early autumn in a sort of fashionable semi-seclusion, mingling only in their own sets, and rather resenting the excursions occasionally made by the plebeian folk into Newport to look at their displays. These princes of inherited wealth have made Newport peculiarly their own, and, their expenditures being on a scale commensurate with their millions, the growth and improvement of the newer part of the place have been extraordinary. Land in choice locations is quoted above $50,000 an acre, and a Newport "cottage" costs $500,000 to $1,000,000 to build, with more for the furnishing. Once, when I asked what was the qualification necessary to become a director of one of the great banks of New York, I was told that it was the ownership of ten shares of stock and a cottage at Newport. The sense of newness is sometimes impressive in gazing at these Aladdin palaces, for while the architecture reproduces quaint and ancient forms, the ancestral ivy does not yet cling to the walls, and the trees are still young. But there are older sites in Newport, back from the sea-front, where some of the estates, existing many years, have smaller and more subdued houses with signs of maturity, where the ivy broadly spreads and the trees have grown. Some of the foliage-embowered lanes, leading through the older suburbs, are charming in leafy richness and make scenes of exquisite rural beauty.
The Casino is the fashionable centre of Newport, a building in Old English style, fronting on Bellevue Avenue, having reading-rooms, a theatre, gardens and tennis-court, and here the band plays in the season, and there are concerts and balls. During the fashionable period, Bellevue Avenue is the daily scene of a stately procession of handsome equipages of all styles, as it is decreed that the great people of Newport shall always ride when on exhibition, and they thus pass and repass in the afternoons in splendid review. In the earlier times the town's chief benefactor was Judah Touro, who gave it Touro Park. His father was the rabbi of Newport synagogue, which now has no congregation. Judah spent fifty years in New Orleans amassing a fortune, which was bequeathed to various charities. He also liberally aided the fund for building Bunker Hill Monument. The synagogue, with the beautiful garden adjacent, the Jewish Cemetery, is maintained in perfect order. Touro Park is a pretty enclosure in the older town, containing statues of Commodore M. C. Perry and William Ellery Channing, who were natives of Newport, and a statue of the former's brother, Commodore Oliver H. Perry, the victor of Lake Erie, is also at the City Hall, not far away. In Touro Park is the great memorial around which the antiquarian treasures of this famous place are clustered, the "Old Stone Mill," a small round tower, overrun with ivy and supported on pillars between which are arched openings. Its origin is a mystery, and this is the antiquarian shrine at which Newport worships. Longfellow tells weirdly of it in his _Skeleton in Armor_, and some of the wise men suggest that it was built by the Norsemen when they first came this way and found Vinland so long ago. But the more practical townsfolk generally incline to the belief that an early colonist put it up for a windmill to grind corn, the weight of the evidence appearing to favor the theory that it was erected by Governor Benedict Arnold, of the colony, who died in 1678, and described it in his will as "my stone-built wind-will." It is, however, of sufficient antiquity and mystery to have a halo cast around it, and is the great relic of the town. The seacoast rocks that make the Newport Cliffs show some wonderful formations of chasms and spouting rocks. A fine fleet of yachts is usually in Newport water, and it is a favorite naval rendezvous, having the Training Station, War College and Torpedo Station, and a new Naval Hospital. This most famous of American seaside watering-places has a permanent population approximating twenty-five thousand, considerably increased by the summer visitors.