the waitresses have this coiffure. It is a livery, as caps are in the Old World; but instead of being a badge of servitude it looks, and is, alarmingly emancipated – so much so that, before making close acquaintance with my dishes, I always examine them with great care. A beautiful mass of hair looks lovely on the head of a woman, but one in your soup, even if it had strayed from the tresses of your beloved one, would make the corners of your mouth go down, and the tip of your nose go up.
A regally handsome woman always “goes well in the landscape,” as the French say, and I have seen specimens of these waitresses so handsome and so commanding-looking that, if they cared to come over to Europe and play the queens in London pantomimes, I feel sure they would command quite exceptional prices, and draw big salaries and crowded houses.
The thing which strikes me most disagreeably, in the American hotel dining-room, is the sight of the tremendous waste of food that goes on at every meal. No European, I suppose, can fail to be struck with this; but to a Frenchman it would naturally be most remarkable. In France, where, I venture to say, people live as well as anywhere else, if not better, there is a horror of anything like waste of good food. It is to me, therefore, a repulsive thing to see the wanton manner in which some Americans will waste at one meal enough to feed several hungry fellow-creatures.
In the large hotels, conducted on the American plan, there are rarely fewer than fifty different dishes on the menu at dinner-time. Every day, and at every meal, you may see people order three times as much of this food as they could under any circumstances eat, and, after picking it and spoiling one dish after another, send the bulk away uneaten. I am bound to say that this practice is not only to be observed in hotels where the charge is so much per day, but in those conducted on the European plan, that is, where you pay for every item you order. There I notice that people proceed in much the same wasteful fashion. It is evidently not a desire to have more than is paid for, but simply a bad and ugly habit. I hold that about five hundred hungry people could be fed out of the waste that is going on at such large hotels as the Palmer House or the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago – and I have no doubt that such five hundred hungry people could easily be found in Chicago every day.
I think that many Europeans are prevented from going to America by an idea that the expense of traveling and living there is very great. This is quite a delusion. For my part I find that hotels are as cheap in America as in England at any rate, and railway traveling in Pullman cars is certainly cheaper than in European first-class carriages, and incomparably more comfortable. Put aside in America such hotels as Delmonico’s, the Brunswick in New York; the Richelieu in Chicago; and in England such hotels as the Metropôle, the Victoria, the Savoy; and take the good hotels of the country, such as the Grand Pacific at Chicago; the West House at Minneapolis, the Windsor at Montreal, the Cadillac at Detroit. I only mention those I remember as the very best. In these hotels, you are comfortably lodged and magnificently fed for from three to five dollars a day. In no good hotel of England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, would you get the same amount of comfort, or even luxury, at the same price, and those who require a sitting-room get it for a little less than they would have to pay in a European hotel.
The only very dear hotels I have come across in the United States are those of Virginia. There I have been charged as much as two dollars a day, but never in my life did I pay so dear for what I had, never in my life did I see so many dirty rooms or so many messes that were unfit for human food.
But I will just say this much for the American refinement of feeling to be met with, even in the hotels of Virginia, even in the “lunch” rooms in small stations, you are supplied, at the end of each meal, with a bowl of water – to rinse your mouth.
CHAPTER V
Began my second American tour under most favorable auspices last night, in the Tremont Temple. The huge hall was crowded with an audience of about 2500 people – a most kind, warm, keen, and appreciative audience. I was a little afraid of the Bostonians; I had heard so much about their power of criticism that I had almost come to the conclusion that it was next to impossible to please them. The Boston newspapers this morning give full reports of my lecture. All of them are kind and most favorable. This is a good start, and I feel hopeful.
The subject of my lecture was “A National Portrait Gallery of the Anglo-Saxon Races,” in which I delineated the English, the Scotch, and the American characters. Strange to say, my Scotch sketches seemed to tickle them most. This, however, I can explain to myself. Scotch “wut” is more like American humor than any kind of wit I know. There is about it the same dryness, the same quaintness, the same preposterousness, the same subtlety.
My Boston audience also seemed to enjoy my criticisms of America and the Americans, which disposes of the absurd belief that the Americans will not listen to the criticism of their country. There are Americans and Americans, as there is criticism and criticism. If you can speak of people’s virtues without flattery; if you can speak of their weaknesses and failings with kindness and good humor, I believe you can criticise to your heart’s content without ever fearing to give offense to intelligent and fair-minded people. I admire and love the Americans. How could they help seeing it through all the little criticisms that I indulged in on the platform? On the whole, I was delighted with my Boston audience, and, to judge from the reception they gave me, I believe I succeeded in pleasing them. I have three more engagements in Boston, so I shall have the pleasure of meeting the Bostonians again.
I have never been able to lecture, whether in England, in Scotland, in Ireland or in America, without discovering, somewhere in the hall, after speaking for five minutes or so, an old gentleman who will not smile. He was there last night, and it is evident that he is going to favor me with his presence every night during this second American tour. He generally sits near the platform, and not unfrequently on the first row. There is a horrible fascination about that man. You cannot get your eyes off him. You do your utmost to “fetch him” – you feel it to be your duty not to send him home empty-headed; your conscience tells you that he has not to please you, but that you are paid to please him, and you struggle on. You would like to slip into his pocket the price of his seat and have him removed, or throw the water bottle at his face and make him show signs of life. As it is, you try to look the other way, but you know he is there, and that does not improve matters.
Now this man, who will not smile, very often is not so bad as he looks. You imagine that you bore him to death, but you don’t. You wonder how it is he does not go, but the fact is he actually enjoys himself – inside. Or, maybe, he is a professional man himself, and no conjuror has ever been known to laugh at another conjuror’s tricks. A great American humorist relates that, after speaking for an hour and a half without succeeding in getting a smile from a certain man in the audience, he sent some one to inquire into the state of his mind.
“Excuse me, sir, did you not enjoy the lecture that has been delivered to-night?”
“Very much indeed,” said the man, “it was a most clever and entertaining lecture.”
“But you never smiled – ”
“Oh, no – I’m a liar myself.”
Sometimes there are other reasons to explain the unsmiling man’s attitude.
One evening I had lectured in Birmingham. On the first row there sat the whole time an old gentleman, with his umbrella standing between his legs, his hands crossed on the handle, and his chin resting on his hands. Frowning, his mouth gaping, and his eyes perfectly vacant, he remained motionless, looking at me, and for an hour and twenty minutes seemed to say to me: “My poor fellow, you may do what you like, but you won’t ‘fetch’ me to-night, I can tell
