most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place,
ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two
beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an
uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women.
We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish.
Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have
drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am
writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is
so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which
we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare
think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we
might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem
limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."

Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the
wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so
long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical
of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper
hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less
pretentious.

Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some passer-by
about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked:
"Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our
pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people
whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that
the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse
from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For
the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part
of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought
shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry
stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy
after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs,
lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.

But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps
under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun
out of the rigours of the American country hotel.

In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we
found no little consolation from the directions prin