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.