Anent this, I must mention a couple of incidents, though not about “tips,” rather of sharp tricks, which reflect on myself.
On our steamer reaching port I was approached by a well-dressed man, who handed me his card, saying that he was connected with Grinder & Co., my bankers, and that he would be pleased to assist me in every way. I told him that I had only a small amount of luggage, that I myself could easily look after, but as his offer was so friendly I could not abruptly decline his services, so he gave an order to a porter to carry my baggage to a cab. A few days afterwards, when I went to look over my account at the Grinders & Co., I found that I was charged twenty-five shillings for the distinguished services of this very plausible clerk. I do not recall the items exactly, but I think there was a shilling for the bit of card he offered me.
Another. Just after arriving at my first lodgings in Craven street, Strand, and had dressed to go out to some restaurant for dinner, the man of the house, with the most saccharine smile and tone of voice, said that they were just about to sit down to a family dinner, and he would be pleased to have me join them. An uncle or aunt, if I had either, could not have invited me with more grace and suavity. It was a very good dinner, and I tried to do the agreeable in conversation, telling them about India, as it seemed I ought to give some return for their kindness, but I had a different feeling when I came to settle my bill, and found myself charged with four shillings for the dinner.
I was cutcha in the ways of the civilized world, that is, green, unripe, and am so still, even in my old age, and doubt if I ever shall be ripe, for I am often taken in by the plausibility of men and also women. After some such experience a kind of mental gloom comes over me, and I feel like repeating Hamlet, after his grandest eulogy of man, “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither.”
Talking about tips, one day my American fellow voyager told me this: “A Yankee, standing on the stern of a steamer leaving Liverpool, held up a shilling and cried out, ‘If there’s a man, woman or child in this island I’ve not tipped, come forward now, as this is your last and only chance.’”
CHAPTER XXXI.
Returning, we soon thought of setting our faces toward the east, though first to the Continent, to see which, I had said I was leaving India, but had forgotten it for something else, and yet would have obtained forgiveness of that something for this slip of my pen had I asked it. I had seen Great Britain, England, the home of my Government, yet not my home, as some Eurasians style it, or as I have heard some Europe-clad natives speak of England, as if they had been born there. The fact is, I was so badly mixed up in my make-up that I hardly knew where my home really should be. I am in somewhat of the quandary of a man who was born of an English father, a Scotch mother, on an American ship, in African waters.
I had made good use of my time in seeing England. I had studied the solid, smileless, arrogant Englishman, who acts, particularly in India, as if he felt that when God had finished making him and his set, He had but little earth from which to make the rest of mankind. He is born a grumbler and a grasper. He is ever finding faults in other people. He is always reaching out to get something, and ever kicking when others try to get a little wealth or a small share of the earth’s surface. In one of my rural tours I saw some swine—and a noble breed of hogs they were, such as we never see in India. When they were fed, one fat old fellow stood sideways to the trough to keep the others away, and when he had got his fill, what did the brute do but lie down lengthwise in the trough to prevent the others from getting anything. Why the very hogs seemed to be characteristic of England. She has more than half of North America, the richest part of Asia, all the Antarctic continent, many islands of the ocean, and while she keeps all she has got she grasps for more. Without conscience as to her own methods of acquisition, she kicks when poor old Russia wants a few barren frozen steppes of central Asia, useless to anybody else, and unmindful that she has just absorbed Burmah, she kicks when France wants a little slice of Siam; she holds Egypt for the benefit of a lot of usurers, and took Burmah on the plea of protecting a sharp trading company. It is curious to note that all the annexations and usurpations of England have been preceded by some trading company, and yet her society folks and aristocracy have such a dislike to trade and tradespeople.
Whether it is the climate, the rain, the fog, the sticky mud, the solid, half-cooked food, and the heavy beer that has made England what she is, yet she is a great nation in her way, the power of the world, with very grand, noble impulses.
“Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,