The greatest American hotels keep a number of clerks and a cashier, and pay them salaries which mount up to a considerable total in the course of a year.  The great continental hotels keep a cashier on a trifling salary, and a portier who pays the hotel A salary.  By the latter system both the hotel and the public save money and are better served than by our system.  One of our consuls told me that a portier of a great Berlin hotel paid five thousand dollars a year for his position, and yet cleared six thousand dollars for himself.  The position of portier in the chief hotels of Saratoga, Long Branch, New York, and similar centers of resort, would be one which the holder could afford to pay even more than five thousand dollars for, perhaps.

When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen years ago, the salary system ought to have been discontinued, of course.  We might make this correction now, I should think.  And we might add the portier, too.  Since I first began to study the portier, I have had opportunities to observe him in the chief cities of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; and the more I have seen of him the more I have wished that he might be adopted in America, and become there, as he is in Europe, the stranger’s guardian angel.

Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago, is just as true today:  “Few there be that can keep a hotel.”  Perhaps it is because the landlords and their subordinates have in too many cases taken up their trade without first learning it.  In Europe the trade of hotel-keeper is taught.  The apprentice begins at the bottom of the ladder and masters the several grades one after the other.  Just as in our country printing-offices the apprentice first learns how to sweep out and bring water; then learns to “roll”; then to sort “pi”; then to set type; and finally rounds and completes his education with job-work and press-work; so the landlord-apprentice serves as call-boy; then as under-waiter; then as a parlor waiter; then as head waiter, in which position he often has to make out all the bills; then as clerk or cashier; then as portier.  His trade is learned now, and by and by he will assume the style and dignity of landlord, and be found conducting a hotel of his own.

Now in Europe, the same as in America, when a man has kept a hotel so thoroughly well during a number of years as to give it a great reputation, he has his reward.  He can live prosperously on that reputation.  He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of shabbiness and yet have it full of people all the time.  For instance, there is the Ho^tel de Ville, in Milan.  It swarms with mice and fleas, and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough to start another one with.  The food would create an insurrection in a poorhouse; and yet if you go outside to get your meals that hotel makes up its loss by overcharging you on all sorts of trifles—­and without making any denials or excuses about it, either.  But the Ho^tel de Ville’s old excellent reputation still keeps its dreary rooms crowded with travelers who would be elsewhere if they had only some wise friend to warn them.