THE ANTI-CLINKER BASE-BURNER BEE.
I have noticed bees very closely indeed, during my life. In fact I have several times been thrown into immediate juxtaposition with them, and have had a great many opportunities to observe their ways, and I am free to say that I have not been so forcibly struck with the difference in their size as the noticeable difference in their temperature. I remember at one time sitting by a hive watching the habits of the bees, and thinking how industrious they were, and what a wide difference there is between the toilsome life of the little insect, and the enervating, aimless, idle and luxurious life of the newspaper man, when an impulsive little bee lit in my hair. He seemed to be feverish. Wherever he settled down he seemed to leave a hot place. I learned afterward that it was a new kind of bee called the anti-clinker base-burner bee.
CHESTNUT-BURR X—A FEW REMARKS ON OUR HOSTELRY SYSTEM AS IT NOW PREVAILS.
Why a man in a Soft Hat is not always Welcome—The Hotel Clerk and his Frigidity Apparatus—The Hotel Hog and his Habits—how he may be Headed Off—Drolleries of Shrewd Bonifaces.
America has made many gigantic strides, aside from those made at the battle of Bull Run, and her people spend much of their time pointing with pride to her remarkable progress; but we are prone to dwell too much upon our advantages as a summer resort, and our adroit methods of declining the Presidency before we are asked, while we forget some of our more important improvements, like the Elevated Railway and the American Hotel.
Let us, for a moment, look at the great changes that have been wrought in hotels during the past century. How marked has been the improvement and how wonderful the advancement. Everything has been changed. Even the towels have been changed.
Electric bells, consisting of a long and alert wire with an overcoat button at one end and a reticent boy at the other, have taken the place of the human voice and a low-browed red-elm club. Where once we were compelled to fall down a dark, narrow staircase, now we can go down the elevator or wander down the wrong stairway and ourselves in the laundry.
Where once we were mortified by being compelled to rise at table, reach nine feet and stab a porous pancake with our fork, meantime wiping the milk gravy out of a large yellow bowl with our coat-tails, now we can hire a tall, lithe gentleman in a full-dress suit to pass us the pancakes.
Even the bar-rooms of American hotels are changed. Once the bartender waited till his customer ran all his remarks into one long, hoarse word, with a hiccough on the end, and then he took him by the collar and threw him out into the cold and chaotic night. Now the bartender gradually rises on the price of drinks till his customer is frozen out, and while he is gone to the reading-room to borrow some more money the chemist moves the bar somewhere else, and when the guest returns he finds a barber-shop where he thought he left a bar-room.
One hundred years, on their swift pinions, have borne away the big and earnest dinner bell, and the sway-backed hair trunk that surprised a man so when he sat down upon it to consider what clothes he would put on first.
All these evidences of our crude, embryotic existence are gone, and in their places we have electric bells, and Saratoga trunks wherein we may conceal our hotel room and still have space left for our clothes.
It is very rare now that we see a United States senator snaking a two-year old Mambrino hair trunk up three flights of stairs to his room in order to secure the labor vote. Men, as well as hotels and hotel soap, have changed. Where once a cake of soap would only last a few weeks, science has come in and perfected a style of pink soap, flavored with vanilla, that will last for years, and a new slippery-elm towel that is absolutely impervious to moisture. Hand in hand, this soap and towel go gaily down the corridors of time, welcoming the coming and speeding the parting guest, jumping deftly out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of a receiver, but always calm, smooth and latherless.
Nature did not fit me to be the successful guest at a hotel. I can see why it is so. I do not know how to impress a hotel. I think all the way up from the depot, as I change hands with my hot-handled and heavy bag, how I will stride up to the counter and ask for the room that is generally given to Mr. Blaine; but when I get there I fall up against a cold wave, step back into a large india-rubber cuspidor, and my overtaxed valise bursts open. While the porter and I gather up my collars and gently press them in with our feet, the clerk decides that he hasn't got such a room as I would want.
I then go to another hotel and succeed in getting a room, which commands a view of a large red fire-escape, a long sweep of undulating eaves-trough and a lightning rod—usually No. 7 5/8s, near the laundry chimney and adjoining the baggage elevator.
After I have remained at the hotel several days and paid my bill whenever I have been asked to do so, and shown that I did not eat much and that I was willing to carry up my own coal, the proprietor relents and puts me in a room that is below timber line, and though it is a better room, I feel all the time as though I had driven out the night-watchman, for the bed is still warm, and knowing that he must be sleeping out in the cold hall all night as he patiently watches the hotel, I cannot sleep until three or four o'clock in the morning, and then I have to get up while the chambermaid makes my bed for the day.
I try hard when I enter a hotel to assume an air of arrogance and defiance, but I am all the time afraid that there is some one present who is acquainted with me.
Another thing that works against me is my apparel. In a strange hotel a man will do better, if he has fifty dollars only, and desires to remain two weeks, to go and buy a fifty-dollar suit of clothes with his money, taking his chances with the clerk, than to dress like a plain American citizen, and expect to be loved, on the grounds that he will pay his board.
But there is now a prospect for reform in this line, a scheme by which a man's name and record as a guest will be his credentials. When this plan becomes thoroughly understood and adopted, a modest man with money, who prefers to wear a soft hat, will not have to sleep in the Union depot, solely on the ground that the night clerk is opposed to a soft hat.
This scheme, to be brief, consists of a system of regular reports from tables and rooms, which reports are epitomized at the office and interchangeable with other hotels, on the principle of the R. G, Dun Commercial Agency. The guest is required to sign his order at the table or give the number of his room, whether the hotel is run on the European plan or not, and these orders in the aggregate, coming from head waiters, porters, chambermaids and bell-boys, make up a man's standing on a scale of from A to Z.
For instance, we will say a five-dollar-per-day house can afford to feed a man for a dollar a meal. The guest orders two dollars' worth, sticks his mustache into just enough of it to spoil it for stew or giblet purposes, and then goes to his room. Here he puts up the fire-escape rope for a clothes-line, does a week's washing, and hanging it out upon the improvised clothesline, he lights a strong pipe, puts his feet on the pillow-shams, and reads "As in a Looking Glass" while his wash is drying. When that man goes away he leaves a record at the hotel which confronts him at every hotel wherever he goes. As soon as he writes his name, the clerk, who has read it wrong side up just a little before he got it down, tells him that he is very sorry, but that the house is full, and people are sleeping on cots in the hall, and the proprietor himself has to sleep on the sideboard. The large white Suffolk hog, who has been in the habit of inaugurating a rain of terror and gravy in the dining-room and stealing the soap from the wash-room, just simply because he could out trump the clerk on diamonds, will thus have to go to the pound, where he belongs, and quiet, every day people, who rely on their integrity more than they do on their squeal, will get a chance.
A great many droll characters and bright, shrewd men are met with among hotel proprietors wherever you go. "The Fat Contributor" was lecturing once in the State of Kentucky, and had occasion to take dinner at a six-bit hotel. After the meal Mr. Griswold stepped up to the counter, took out a bale of bank notes, which he had received for his lecture the evening before, and asked what might be the damage.
"Three dollars," said the blue grass gentleman, who had buttoned his collar with a tenpenny nail, while he looked at "Gris" with a pained expression.
"Yes, but a man ought to be able to board here a week for three dollars. The whole house didn't cost more than forty or forty-five dollars. What's your idea in charging me three dollars for a wad of hominy and a piece of parched pork?"
"Well, sir," said the urbane landlord, as he put out the fire at a. distance of twenty feet by emptying his salivary surplus on it, "I need the money?"
The frankness and open, candid manner of the man won Mr. Griswold, and he asked him if he thought three dollars would be enough. The landlord said he could get along with that. Then Griswold opened his valise and took out a large brunette bottle of liniment marked "for external use." He passed it over to the landlord, and told him that he would find this stuff worked as well on the inside as it did on the outside. In a few moments the liniment of the "Fat Contributor" and the lineaments of the landlord had merged into each other, and a friendly feeling sprang up between the two men which time has never effaced. I have often thought of this, and wondered why it is that hotel men are not more open and cordial with their guests. Many a time I have paid a large bill grudgingly when I would have done it cheerfully if the landlord had told me he was in need.
I had intended to speak at some length on the new rope law, by which every man is made his own vigilance committee; but I feel that I am already encroaching on the advertising space, and so will have to omit it. In conclusion, I will say that the American hotels are far preferable to those we have in Paris in many ways, and not only outstrip those of England and the Continent, even as a corps de ballet outstrips a toboggan club, but they seem to excel and everlastingly knock the ancient hotels of Carthage, Rome and Tie Siding silly.