you send for your hotel bill.  You do not go to the desk and settle up there after the American fashion.  If you have learned the ropes you order your room waiter to fetch your bill to you, and in the privacy of your apartment you pore over the formidable document wherein every small charge is fully specified, the whole concluding with an impressive array of items regarding which you have no prior recollection whatsoever.  Considering the total, you put aside an additional ten per cent, calculated for division on the basis of so much for the waiter, so much for the boots, so much for the maid and the porter, and the cashier, and the rest of them.  It is not necessary that you send for these persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them; they will be waiting for you in the hallways.  No matter how early or late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a long and serried rank.

You distribute bills and coins until your ten per cent is exhausted, and then you are pained to note that several servitors yet remain, lined up and all expectant, owners of strange faces that you do not recall ever having seen before, but who are now at hand with claims, real or imaginary, on your purse.  Inasmuch as you have a deadly fear of being remembered afterward in this hotel as a piker, you continue to dip down and to fork over, and so by the time you reach the tail end of the procession your ten per cent has grown to twelve or fifteen per cent, or even more.

As regards the tipping of guides for their services, I hit on a fairly satisfactory plan, which I gladly reveal here for the benefit of my fellow man.  I think it is a good idea to give the guide, on parting, about twice as much as you think he is entitled to, which will be about half as much as he expects.  From this starting point you then work toward each other, you conceding a little from time to time, he abating a trifle here and there, until you have reached a happy compromise on a basis of fifty-fifty; and so you part in mutual good will.

The average American, on the eve of going to Europe, thinks of the European as speaking each his own language.  He conceives of the Poles speaking Polar; of the Hollanders talking Hollandaise; of the Swiss as employing Schweitzer for ordinary conversations and yodeling when addressing friends at a distance; and so on.  Such, however, is rarely the case.  Nearly every person with whom one comes in contact in Europe appears to have fluent command of several tongues besides his or her own.  It is true this does not apply to Italy, where the natives mainly stick to Italian; but then, Italian is not a language.  It is a calisthenic.