One piece of advice:  You will not get good service unless you tip generously.  If you do not care for elaborate meals, that is nothing to your discredit; but you should not go to an expensive hotel, hold a table that would otherwise be occupied by others who might order a long dinner, and expect your waiter to be contented with a tip of fifteen cents for your dollar supper!  The rule is ten per cent, beginning with a meal costing about three or four dollars.  A quarter is the smallest possible tip in a first class hotel.  If your meal costs a quarter—­you should give the waiter a quarter.  If it costs two dollars or more than two dollars, you give thirty or thirty-five cents, and ten per cent on a bigger amount.  In smaller hotels tips are less in proportion.  Tipping is undoubtedly a bad system, but it happens to be in force, and that being the case, travelers have to pay their share of it—­if they like the way made smooth and comfortable.

A lady traveling alone with her maid (or without one), of necessity has her meals alone in her own sitting-room, if she has one.  If she goes to the dining-room, she usually takes a book because hotel service seems endless to one used to meals at home and nothing is duller than to sit long alone with nothing to do but look at the tablecloth, which is scarcely diverting, or at other people, which is impolite.

=ON THE STEAMER=

In the days when our great-grandparents went to Europe on a clipper ship carrying at most a score of voyagers and taking a month perhaps to make the crossing, those who sat day after day together, and evening after evening around the cabin lamp, became necessarily friendly; and in many instances not only for the duration of the voyage but for life.  More often than not, those who had “endured the rigors” of the Atlantic together, joined forces in engaging the courier who was in those days indispensable, and set out on their Continental travels in company.  Dashing to Europe and back was scarcely to be imagined, and travelers who had ventured such a distance, stayed at least a year or more.  Also in those slower days of crawling across the earth’s surface by post-chaise and diligence and horseback, travelers meeting in inns and elsewhere, fell literally on each other’s neck at the sound of an American accent!  And each retailed to the other his news of home; to which was added the news of all whom they had encountered.  It is also from these “traveling ancestors” that families inherit their Continental visiting lists.  Friends they made in Europe, in turn gave letters of introduction to friends coming later to America.  And to them again their American hosts sent letters by later American friends.

But to-day when going to Europe is of scarcely greater importance than going into another State, and when the passenger list numbers hundreds, “making friends with strangers” is the last thing the great-grandchildren of those earlier travelers would think of.