is no bustle, no noise, no eager nor anxious look of served or servants.  Every one is calm, collected, and comfortable.  “The cares that infest the day” do not ride into the presence of that roast beef and plum pudding on the wrinkles of any man’s forehead, however business affairs may go with him outside.  No one is in a hurry to sit down or to arise from the table.  The whole economy of the establishment is to make you as much at home as possible; to individualise you, as far as it can be done, in every department of personal comfort.  You follow your own time and inclination, and eat and drink when and how you please, with others or alone.  The congregate system is the exception, not the rule.  It seldom ever obtains at breakfast or tea.  In many cases you have a little round table all to yourself at these meals.  But if there is a common table for half a dozen persons, the tea and toast and other eatables are never aggregated into a common stock.  Each person if he is a single guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate tea-pot.  The table d’hote, if there be one at all, is made up like a select dinner party, rather early in the morning.  If the guests of the house are not directly invited, they are asked, in a tone of hospitality, if they will join in the social meal, the only one got up by the establishment at which the table is not mapped out in separate holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.

The presiding and working faculty of a common English inn distinguishes it by another salient characteristic from the hotels of other countries.  The landlady is, of course, the president of the establishment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the retired and family department of the house.  But the actual gerantes, or working corps, with which you have to do immediately, are three independent and distinct personages, called the waiter, chambermaid, and boots.  If it were respectful to gender, these might be called the great triumvirate of the English inn.  No traveller after a night’s lodging and breakfast, will mistake or confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials.  If he is an American, and it be his first experience of the regime, he will be surprised and puzzled at the imperium in imperio which his bill, presented to him on a tea-tray, seems to represent.  In no other business transaction of his life did he ever see the like.  It goes far beyond anything in the line of limited partnership he ever saw.  There is only one partial parallel that approaches it; and this comes to his mind as he reads the several items on his bill.  When made out and interpreted, it comes to this:  the proprietor, the waiter, chambermaid, and boots are independent parties, who get up a night’s lodging and two or three meals for you on the same footing as four independent underwriters would take proportionate risks at Lloyd’s in some ship at sea.  Or,