fire) at midnight, pass by a
windswept hall and staircase (temperature 55 deg.) to a bedroom full of fine
fresh air (temperature 50 deg. to 40 deg.), and in that chamber, having removed
piece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to slip, imperfectly
protected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep. Certainly I had always
contested the joyfulness of that particular process; but my imagination
had fallen short of the delicious innumerable realities of comfort in an
American home.

Now, having regained the "barbaric seats" whence I came, I read with a
peculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and town
residences to rent or for sale in England. Such as: "Choice residence.
Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bathroom--" Or: "Thoroughly
up-to-date mansion. Six reception-rooms. Splendid hall. Billiard-room.
Twenty-four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms--" I read this literature (to be
discovered textually every week in the best illustrated weeklies), and I
smile. Also I wonder, faintly blushing, what Americans truly _do_ think
of the residential aspects of European house-property when they first
see it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree of
perfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if only
they cared enough to keep the professional politician out of their
streets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

* * * * *

The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European who
in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm orderliness of
the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the reckless
profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds under
one's door in the morning, "You were called at seven-thirty, and
answered," the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room
is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects duly
starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, the
thickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, the
celestial invention of the floor-clerk--I could catalogue the civilizing
features of the American hotel for pages. But the great American hotel
is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept. My one excuse for doing
so is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a
whole book about one. When I told the best interviewer in the United
States that my secret ambition had always been to