encountered any actual rudeness from the American hotel clerk such as I have experienced from the pert young ladies who sometimes fill his place in England; and in the less frequented resorts he sometimes took a good deal of trouble to put the stranger in the way to do his business speedily and comfortably.  His omniscience is great, but not so phenomenal as I expected; I posed him more than once with questions about his abode which, it seemed to me, every intelligent citizen should have been able to answer easily.  In his most characteristic development the American hotel clerk is an urbane living encyclopaedia, as passionless as the gods, as unbiassed as the multiplication table, and as tireless as a Corliss engine.

Traveller’s tales as to the system of “tipping” in American hotels differ widely.  The truth is probably as far from the indignant Briton’s assertion, based probably upon one flagrant instance in New York, that “it is ten times worse than in England and tantamount to robbery with violence,” as from the patriotic American’s assurance that “The thing, sir, is absolutely unknown in our free and enlightened country; no American citizen would demean himself to accept a gratuity.”  To judge from my own experience, I should say that the practice was quite as common in such cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia as in Europe, and more onerous because the amounts expected are larger.  A dollar goes no farther than a shilling.  Moreover, the gratuity is usually given in the form of “refreshers” from day to day, so that the vengeance of the disappointed is less easily evaded.  Miss Bates, a very friendly writer on America, reports various unpleasantnesses that she received from untipped waiters, and tells of an American who found that his gratuities for two months at a Long Branch hotel (for three persons and their horses) amounted to L40.  In certain other walks of life the habit of tipping is carried to more extremes in New York than in any European city I know of.  Thus the charge for a shave (already sufficiently high) is 7-1/2_d._, but the operator expects 2-1/2_d._ more for himself.  One barber with whom I talked on the subject openly avowed that he considered himself wronged if he did not get his fee, and recounted the various devices he and his fellows practised to extract gratuities from the unwilling.  As one goes West or South the system of tipping seems to fall more and more into abeyance, though it will always be found a useful smoother of the way.  In California, so far as I could judge, it was almost entirely unknown, and the Californian hotels are among the best in the Union.

Among the lessons which English and other European hotels might learn from American hotels may be named the following: 

1.  The combination of the present a la carte system with the inclusive or American system, by which those who don’t want the trouble of ordering their repasts may be sure of finding meals, with a reasonable latitude of choice in time and fare, ready when desired.  It is a sensible comfort to know beforehand exactly, or almost exactly, what one’s hotel expenses will amount to.