with the landlady and her bucolic spouse.

Of the latter kind I had a never-tobe-repeated experience at a coast-town inn which shall be nameless, where the landlady introduced herself by enlarging on the advantage I enjoyed in finding an hotel kept by "people of the same class" as myself. On paying my bill I comforted myself with the reflection that I was paying for this privilege "thrown in." As might be expected from persons of the class to which we both belong, this good landlady and I, she got the better of me in the matter of the exchange (as I discovered when there were three good days' journey between us), charged me two pesetas for cleaning her washhandstand, and one dollar for mending her mosquito curtain.

But at least the hotel-dweller is spared certain experiences calculated to make the thrifty housewife what an American friend of mine calls "hopping mad." Such an experience, for instance, as fell to my lot when, having sent up certain provisions to a

house we had taken with a view to entering it in a few days, I found on our arrival that the bedroom washhand-stands were all furnished with neat square pieces of carbolic scrubbing-soap. The floors had been washed with the Vinolia otto of rose tablets given at the same time as the other, with manifold explanations, to the intelligent negress whose duty it had been to "prepare" the house for our reception.

There is no doubt that a household whose staff includes a competent, conscientious housekeeper realizes the highest ideal of comfort possible in home life. But as this joyous consummation is an unattainable ideal to many who are unequal to the struggle necessary to obtaining the same outward result through their own agency, they fall back upon the hotel as the

nearest approach to this state of irresponsible well-being. But even in this beatific condition one's personal attendants refuse to accept any intermediary, and one remains directly responsible to one's maid for her comfort and well-being. When, many years ago, I blossomed out almost from childhood into a full-blown state of matrimonial responsibility, I did some travelling in America. One day we arrived at an hotel in some town between New York and Chicago, and my immediate personal wants having been attended to, I dismissed my maid with the injunction that she herself was to go and feed. She re-entered my room a few seconds after with indignation depicted on her usually good-humored Scotch face. "A nice sort of place we've come to, this," she exclaimed; "when I asked one of the waiters where the maids had their meals, he answered impudently, 'Along with the married women, to be sure.' She failed to see any justification for my amusement, but was pacified by a stern demand from her employer that his wife's lady's-maid should immediately be conducted to the apartment reserved for the meals of the personal attendants of the hotel guests. Her troubles, however, at this same place were not at an end, for on calling me next morning she appeared with eyes swollen and red, having spent a sleepless night bug-hunting. The strange, absolutely unprecedented appearance of these uninvited guests was accounted for by the manager of the hotel by the fact that my unfortunate maid's room had been occupied the night before by a commercial traveller, whose own version of the affair we were of course unable to obtain.

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I here apologize for writing the name of this obnoxious insect other than as "b-g." I knew a lady, whose refined conversation it was my privilege occasionally to enjoy, who in the autumn of the year used to find herself

troubled with what she called "harvest hum-hums," and it would be difficult for me now to recognize this insiduous little plague by any other name. When, however, we asked this same lady if she did not think that this ultra-refinement, which shirked the naming of so open-air a little animal as the harvestbug, was rather "hum hum-hum," she did not follow us at all. Her refinement was, however, amply accounted for by a fact with which she was at pains to acquaint her listeners, namely, that her ancestors were French marquises while the ancestors of most of the people thus unaccountably unable to appreciate the advantage of having her as a neighbor were digging potatoes. However, our ancestors not having been French marquises, we put the matter very plainly before our innkeeper, and told him that such troubles were a disgrace to the principal hotel in so important a city as the one we were stopping at, and, with many expressions of regret, and efforts at conciliation towards the offended lady, we resumed our way.

The American hotels, however, from what I hear, are vastly improved since the days of which I write-now, I regret to confess, nearly twenty years ago. Nowadays, nearly all over the States, I hear that, even in the remote towns, the hotels are sumptuous palaces. Numerous time-saving inventions decorate each bedroom. Wonderful wheels, for instance, which

when

turned with the handle pointing to where the names of certain articles are

inscribed, will, within an incredibly short space of time, produce a waiter bringing with him either hot, cold, iced, or soda water, whisky, brandy, tea, coffee, or almost any other daily or hourly need that your soul happens to long for, before your soul, weary with waiting, has had time to "go back on you," as it often does in less electrical countries, when a stultifying res

ignation takes the place of a gratified craving.

But even without these "modern improvements," such as the "magic wheel" and the nerve-harrowing telephone, the American hotels were more luxurious and commodious than English or French hotels at the same period. The adjacent bathroom was a continual source of delight and refreshment when one arrived at one's destination weary, travel-stained and forlorn. The negro waiters, too, afforded us much diversion. I remember on one occasion expostulating with one for his inattention, saying: "I have asked you twice before for"-whatever it was I wanted. "Pardon me, ma'am," he replied with great dignity, "it was another colored gentleman you asked." A reply of that kind is quite enough to disarm any amount of indignation.

The "tips" at any hotel are, as I found to my dismay on the first occasion when, being alone, I had to do all the paying myself, a very formidable item. And à propos of this difficulty I recently came across the following note to the Westminster Gazette under the head of "Good News for Swiss Tourists":

If the conference of Swiss commercial travellers, hotel-keepers, and other interested persons which has just taken place at Olten has its way, then the burden of the summer tourist in Switzerland will be considerably lightened. The above-mentioned would-be benefactors of the travelling public met in order to find some remedy for the everincreasing system of "tips," which obliges the traveller to pay away almost as much as his hotel expenses proper to the army of hotel servants. It has now been decided-by the thriceblessed Olten conference that a fixed "tarif des pourboires" is to be drawn up, and if this tariff is at all mercifully conceived (from the traveller's point of view), then travelling in Switzerland will be a good deal less expensive. According to the nice old French formula,

tips are "onerous to those who give them and humiliating to those who receive them," and the proposed tariff ought, therefore, to be equally welcome to "tipster" and "tipped."

But it is not only at hotels that the system of "tips" is irksome, and at times humiliating to both "tipper" and "tippee," as I prefer to render the giver and receiver of "tips." In this matter the guests of wealthy owners of large country houses sometimes suffer considerable inconvenience, keepers, coachmen and grooms without, and butlers, footmen and housemaids within, all expecting and receiving "tips" from one or other of the guests of a large house party. I was told once of an extraordinary experience undergone by a lady, to whom economy was rendered none the less necessary from the fact that circumstances compelled her to visit much amongst relations and friends to whom this most irksome form of ignominy was unknown. She was paying a definite Monday to Friday visit at a large, luxurious country house, and to her delight she found in her bedroom a neat little affiche, a duplicate of which was in each guest-chamber, to the effect that the host and hostess earnestly requested that no "tips" should be given to any of the servants. To her dismay, however, when all the guests were assembling in the hall previous to their imminent departure in the various brakes, carriages, and flys that were waiting ready to convey them to the station, she perceived the stately and dignified groom of the chambers standing statuesquely near the front door, holding a plate resembling those used in church for collections, in which several gold pieces were already gleaming. In answer to my friend's petrified gaze, her hostess stepped forward and said sweetly, "Yes, we consider this a much fairer way of dealing with the presents our guests are kind enough to wish to give to one's servants. Any

thing they like to give is distributed fairly between those who really have had extra work to do for a large party of this kind; otherwise only those who are en évidence, and who really do nothing extra, are given anything." The little gift which the poor lady had been congratulating herself she would be able to take home to her child was swallowed up in this brazen receptacle. A gallant little midshipman once bravely resisted the onslaught of one of the pampered, overfed harpies whose depredations we suppose the good lady referred to above tried to stop by so mistaken a method. He offered the magnificent individual who had been "valeting" him two-and-sixpence on leaving; but that dignitary threw up his hand, saying, "I never haccept hanythink but gold," whereupon the "middy" returned the halfcrown to his pocket, exclaiming, "What a brick you are! I find half-crowns awfully useful." Perhaps this was the first youth the creature had not been successful in intimidating into giving up half-a-sovereign of his precious little store.

I once had a curious experience of this kind in my still early married days. I was paying a visit of two nights' duration in a country house, and before dinner the second night I saw a sovereign drop, unobserved by my husband, out of a pocket of the waistcoat he was just taking off. Considering him to be at all times overcareless in the matter of ready money, I quietly rescued the coin, and, returning to my room, secreted it in a corner of the dressing-table underneath muslin cover, meaning to question and reprimand him later on. We left next morning, and alas! for the moral influence I fervently desired and intended to wield, I stupidly forgot all about this secreted coin. However, never dreaming it was other than in safety where I had put it, and having no doubt,

a

either then or subsequently, as to the exact spot in which it had been left, and not wishing to trouble my hostess, I wrote a line (in addition to the "Collins" letter I had dutifully, bored my hostess with) to the daughter of the house, explaining the circumstances and asking her to send the pound to me. By return of post I received a furious letter from my whilom hostess, enclosing half-a-crown, and saying that that was the only piece of money I had left on the dressing-table in the room I occupied, which the housemaid had presumed was intended as a gift to her, but that since I accused her of theft she declined to accept anything from me, and therefore she had begged her mistress to return it to me, without thanks, I presume. The correspondence ended there, and, like the "middy," I pocketed my half-crown, the poorer by seventeen-and-sixpence only for my unhappily conceived, would-be practical lesson on thrift and heedfulness.

It often happens that when one is giving one's attention to any particular subject incidents occur which would, perhaps, pass unobserved but for the fact that at the actual moment one's mind is on the alert for anything that touches on that subject. So it happened that when I was pondering on hotels and hotel life I went to stay with some friends officially posted at a stoppingplace between Africa and home, and when I heard the petulant exclamation, in answer to a husband's remonstrance anent continual grumbling: "How can you expect me to like an hotel after having just left a house of my own?" I thought: "Here is a confirmation of what I have affirmed: hotels as homes are an impossibility." One of the complaints was the inevitable and continual proximity of a dipsomaniac. "My dear, that is an exaggerated name for the poor chap," mildly suggested the husband. It was true he was never violently or blatantly intoxicated, she

admitted; but, on the other hand, he was never sober, and his presence consequently was obnoxious. I confess I sympathized with the aggrieved lady. But that is, after all, the chief drawback to hotel life: you cannot choose your housemates. And to have the possibility of a drunken outburst hanging over one must be very trying. Yet so long as your fellow-guests keep within the limits of conventional decorum neither guest nor host has a right to request retirement.

A certain lady, however, who keeps an hotel in a foreign seaport town, allows no consideration by which ordinary mortals may be swayed to govern her if she desires to evict any of the temporary inmates of her house. During a short stay of about three months in this same town I heard of six different people having been evicted at different times. No further reason did she vouchsafe to any of them beyond saying that she required their rooms. She went so far, however, as to inform one of these recipients of her displeasure that "She was no lady." I had met the individual whose gentility was thus called into question, and she seemed to me as perfectly harmless and able to fulfil all the requirements necessary for the wide term of "lady" to have applied to her without any particular incongruity. This arbitrary dame has

secured the best site and the best situation in the town for her palatial inn, and her autocratic conduct receives apparent justification from the fact that her rooms are always full. I confess, however, that this reputation would make me hesitate to recommend my friends to stay with her; for on the conduct of none can I rely so implicitly as to persuade myself that under no circumstances could it possibly offend the wayward susceptibilities of this specialist in hotel demeanor. The possibility, too, of this lady's case not being a unique instance of capricious

crankiness would give one pause when contemplating the abandonment of the home in favor of the hotel.

That an "Englishman's house is his castle" is a hackneyed but true saying, that calls to mind a Moorish proverb which affirms that "A lion roars loudest in his own forest," and which is less elegantly rendered by "A cock The Cornhill Magazine.

crows shrillest on his own dungheap." The sense of security is not the least attraction possessed by the freehold or leasehold; and it will be some time before any form of communal living will be adopted by the Britisher, no matter in what direction other nations may appear to be moving.

The man of taste is commonly unwilling to write about his personal and private experiences. Poets, to be sure, are an exception, and we are glad to accept the result, though sometimes a slight surprise may mingle with our admiration as they reveal their intimacies. But to set down in plain prose one's sensations in love and bereavement would be monstrous (it has been done), and must bring overwhelming discomfort upon the sensitive reader. Even the minor accidents of private life are felt by the man of taste to be no subject for his pen, to be at once a prodigality of himself and an intrusion on the public. His friends have not this feeling, and are constantly urging him to "make an article" of some pleasant event, an excursion or what not, but (when the man of taste is concerned) without success. So, I feel that it is no business of a magazine that I am short of sight, and that I have lately been fitted with spectacles which enable me to see like other men; and I feel, moreover, that the readers of a magazine might be apt to agree.

Nevertheless I shall break the rule. The affair does not, after all, touch the secrets of my heart: I am full of it, and it will be interesting, I am con

vinced, to other people. It is not as though a blind man had been made to see, but it is something in that way.

I had been conscious of short sight almost as long as I can remember, but in the last ten years or so my sight had become much shorter. But I did not know how bad it was-how far inferior to the sight of ordinary men. I increased the strength of a single eyeglass I wore, and imagined that when I wore it I saw pretty well. Constitutionally averse from doing anything definite, I postponed and postponed an interview with an oculist. Eventually, however, I saw one (I wish a man of taste might advertise him), who prescribed spectacles which, he told me, would bring my sight very near the normal. And ever since I have had those spectacles I have been aware of thronging new sensations and expe riences. Intellectually, æsthetically, socially, the world-and not the visible world alone is changed to me. I see definite objects where I saw nothing, I see faces where before I merely inferred that faces were, I see expressions where before I saw only faces. The comparative effect of all this should be interesting, I believe: if it merely tells the lucky-sighted how much they score, or sends the unlucky