Nevertheless, the jovial facetiousness of these commercial gentlemen knows no limits, and hotel-waiters are, at all times, fair game for their stings and arrows. In one of the northern hotels, there used to be a portly and rubicund waiter who might have passed for the High Priest of the Goddess of Health. His face shone, if I may say so, with the radiance of perfect digestion. A pert commercial, one day, approached him with an affected look of deep concern and said, "Well, I hope you're keeping better," accompanying the remark with a dig in the waiter's stomach. The waiter, who had never known a minute's ill-health in his life, swore vividly for fifteen minutes without repeating himself, and among many references to the commercial's ancestry, called him the two-est-faced knave that had ever set foot on the Shetland Islands. Such a superlative was felt by all to be a masterpiece of language, and turned the laugh against the bagman.[27]
MARY, THE MAID OF THE INN.
I have a great deal of sympathy with hotel-porters and waiters, and think them unduly longsuffering at times. As to Mary, the exemplary maid of the hotel alluded to, she can hold her own in repartee with any of the visitors. She is a distinct character, and Molière could have made a "type" of her. She has no sinecure of a situation, and, after eleven at night, when the last supper is over, she has to polish the knives for the morrow's breakfast. She is young, slim, and active, and wears a string of red corals round her neck. The place is not frequented by plutocratic tourists, and so her tips are meagre. In spite of her long days and her slim perquisites, the girl is affable, smiling, and gay. She trips out and in, sylph-like, can carve fowls most dexterously by the light of nature, never spills the soup, and has a laughing and appropriate word for all. Mary, I hope, will get some decent fellow for husband, and be a stay and comfort to him all the days of his life. Meanwhile, however (to use the historic present), a nice old gentleman in the soft goods line, who hails from the flourishing village of Dundee, is paying her marked attentions. She will have none of him, for all his apostolic looks. He repeats to her, with a comically sentimental air, the lines of Omar:
"Here with a book of verse beneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
The wilderness were Paradise enow."
Mary looks in amazement at the old gentleman with the insinuating voice, anon bursts into a merry peal, and trips off with the remark, "There's nae fules like auld anes," which a listening Londoner takes to mean, "There's nothing fills like onions!"
ANECDOTES OF THE SMOKING-ROOM.
SONNET TO RALEIGH.
The conversation of an intelligent commercial traveller is, as I said, of a facetious and entertaining turn. He speaks to so many people in the course of a day and hears so many anecdotes as he rushes about, that his sense of humour becomes very keen. Old Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, used to dissipate his sombre thoughts by listening to the coarse badinage of bargemen: a modern, afflicted with Burton's complaint, might well find a cure in the smoking-room of a hotel among a company of commercial travellers. One Saturday night, in a Shetland hotel, I listened to a crowd of these merry gentlemen communicating to each other their several collections of stories. Before doing so, they all sang with great fervour the well-known hymn The Sands of Time are Sinking, a whisky-traveller officiating at the harmonium. One of the number ostentatiously beat time with his pipe. It was a very affecting scene, and certain of the singers were moved to tears at their own melody.
The company then settled down, in a pleased frame of mind, to tell stories. I noted some of these, and as they were new to me, I cherish the hope that they may not be stale to others. The following preliminary sonnet to Sir Walter Raleigh seems to be apposite and new; it is needed to give atmosphere to the tales:
Raleigh! the benefactor of thy kind,
May azure undulations ever roll
As incense to thee from the glowing bowl,
Thy rapt disciples fume with placid mind
In easy chair, by ingle-nook reclined!
Next to the mage, Prometheus, who stole
From Heaven's court with philanthropic soul,
The wonder-working fire, thou art enshrined
In mortal bosoms as a friend, for thou
Did'st bring from sunset isles the magic leaf
That weaves enchantment's halo round the brow,
Alleviates the pang of every grief
And stirs the bard, exempt from fretting cares,
To wail the weird of pipeless millionaires.