2.  The abolition of the charge for attendance.

3.  A greater variety of dishes than is usually offered in any except our very largest hotels.  This is especially to be desired at breakfast.  Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found.  There is probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow this most excellent “American lead.”  The British tourist in the United States takes so kindly to the preliminary fruit and cereal dishes of America that he would probably show no objection to them on his native heath.

4.  An extension of the system of ringing once for the boots, twice for the chambermaid, and so on.  The ordinary American table of calls goes up to nine.

5.  The provision of writing materials free for the guests of the hotels.  The charge for stationery is one of the pettiest and most exasperating cheese-parings of the English Boniface’s system of account-keeping.  If, however, he imitates the liberality of his American brother, it is to be hoped that he will “go him one better” in the matter of blotting-paper.  Nothing in the youthful country across the seas has a more venerable appearance than the strips of blotting-paper supplied in the writing-rooms of its hotels.

Nothing in its way could be more inviting or seem more appropriate than the cool and airy architecture of the summer hotels in such districts as the White Mountains, with their wide and shady verandas, their overhanging eaves, their balconies, their spacious corridors and vestibules, their simple yet tasteful wood-panelling, their creepers outside and their growing plants within.  Mr. Howells has somewhere reversed the threadbare comparison of an Atlantic liner to a floating hotel, by likening a hostelry of this kind to a saloon steamer; and indeed the comparison is an apt one, so light and buoyant does the construction seem, with its gaily painted wooden sides, its glass-covered veranda decks, and its streaming flags.  Perhaps the nearest analogue that we have to the life of an American summer hotel is seen in our large hydropathic establishments, such as those at Peebles or Crieff, where the therapeutic appliances play but a subdued obbligato to the daily round of amusements.  The same spirit of camaraderie generally rules at both; both have the same regular meal-hours, at which almost as little drinking is seen at the one as the other; both have their evening entertainments got up (gotten up, our American cousins say, with a delightfully old fashioned flavour) by the enterprise of the most active guests.  The hydropathists have to go to bed a little sooner, and must walk to the neighbouring village if they wish a bar-room; but on the whole their scheme of life is much the same.  Whether it is due to the American temperament or the American