'ARRY ON THE BOULEVARDS
ON THE CHEAP
(From the Journal of a Travelling Economist)
["On the other hand, however, we must avow some apprehension that too minute attention to the possibility of cheap travel may render a Continental tour a continual vexation and trouble. Plain living and high thinking are, as Mr. Capper says, crying wants of these days; but the latter condition is hardly to be attained by the self-imposed necessity of striking a bargain with a landlord at the end of each day's journey."—Times.]
3 A.M.—Roused for the seventeenth time since midnight. Vow I will never go to a fourth-class hotel again. Try to get a little sleep on four chairs and a sliding bureau. Can't. Begin a letter to the Times in my head.
4 A.M.—Get up and look for ink. Wake the others. Order five breakfasts for seven of us, and explain to the landlord that we have to catch the 4.57 cheap "omnibus" train for Farthingheim.
5 A.M.—Row with landlord about bougies. Will charge for them, though we all went to bed in the dark. Explain this. He snaps his fingers in my face, calls me "Ein schwindlinder Beleidiger!" refuses to split the breakfasts, and seizes my portmanteau.
6 A.M.—Row still proceeding. Cheap train hopelessly missed. Look out "Beleidiger" in a dictionary, and go upstairs and collect all the bougies in a carpet-bag. Pay bill in full, threaten to write to Bradshaw, and go off, carrying all our own luggage to station, followed by a jeering crowd.
7 A.M.—Sit down on it, and, with the assistance of a Phrase-book, tell the crowd in German that "this isn't the sort of treatment a parcel of foreigners would experience, under similar circumstances, in the Tottenham Court Road."