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.