The Englishman smilingly replied: “In far off China I have carried about my own bedding from inn to inn, not caring to occupy that in which a Celestial, a Tartar, or a Russian had slept the night before. In France, I have taken around my little piece of soap, an almost unknown luxury in Continental hotels. In India, I have lodged in the dak bungalows provided by the government, where the articles of furniture are like donkey’s gallops—few and far between. There you must manage the commissariat department yourself if you would not starve. I remember once stopping at one of the best country hotels in the Bombay Presidency, and was given a sitting-room, a bed-room, and a bath-room; but in the first a number of birds had built their nests, and flew in and out and roundabout at their pleasure; in the bed-room a colony of ants swarmed over the floor, while in my third room cockroaches and other creeping things gave a variegated hue to the pavement; everything else was in keeping.”
“Horrors!” exclaimed Mrs. L.
“Unpleasant, to say the least,” I remarked, “unless, indeed, you were a naturalist.”
“I think,” continued our traveled friend, “that one never feels at home in an European hotel. You never know your landlord or your fellow-sojourners; the table d’hôte in the grand dining-halls prevents all intercourse between the guests; they never have a smoking-room, a billiard-room, a bar-room, or a bath-room; if you want to do ‘tumbies’ you are furnished with a regular old tub.”
“I know that from experience”, said my wife. “Once at a grand hotel in Florence I wanted a bath, and was promised one. By-and-by, as I sat at my window in the gloaming, I saw a man trundling a handcart containing a bath and some barrels. In a few minutes two men solemnly ushered this identical tub into my room, then in three successive trips they brought in three barrels of water, two cold, the other hot; a sheet was spread over the bath, and the water allowed to gurgle out of the bunghole into it, while with uprolled sleeve the swarthy Italian mingled the hot and the cold with his hand till what he considered a suitable temperature was gained. When all was ready, the man coolly asked how soon he should come back for his apparatus. Actually there was neither bath nor water in the hotel, although the Arno rolled beneath its windows. As you say, bath-rooms are unknown in civilized Europe.”
“Then, again,” I said, “if you want your dinner, and are not at table d’hôte, you must write out a list of what you want as long as a newspaper editorial, hand it in, and wait longer than it would take to set it up in type before the eatables appear. I have known people wait an hour at swell hotels, and then go away unsatisfied.”
“There are plenty of hotels in all large English towns,” said our friend; “but none a quarter of the size of the large caravansaries to be found in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, or San Francisco. Their exteriors are rather fine, a few rooms are well furnished; but, on the whole, they are dark and dingy.”
“Were you ever at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, in Paris?” asked my wife.
“Yes. What a splendid place it is! The dining-room is not the largest, but it is as fine as any in the world; its ornamentation is so chaste, its chandeliers so splendid, its mirrors so magnificent, and the dinner is perfection; in fact, as some one says, it is the elysium of the bon-vivants and the paradise of the esthetic. But if I go on in this style you will take me for a ‘runner’ for first-class hotels.” We then passed on to another subject, as the reader must to another chapter.