miles of experiences--that money
will not buy you service in the West. When the hotel clerk--the man
who awards your room to you and who is supposed to give you
information--when that resplendent individual stoops to attend to your
wants he does so whistling or humming or picking his teeth, or pauses
to converse with some one he knows. These performances, I gather, are to
impress upon you that he is a free man and your equal. From his general
appearance and the size of his diamonds he ought to be your superior.
There is no necessity for this swaggering self-consciousness of freedom.
Business is business, and the man who is paid to attend to a man might
reasonably devote his whole attention to the job. Out of office hours he
can take his coach and four and pervade society if he pleases.

In a vast marble-paved hall, under the glare of an electric light,
sat forty or fifty men, and for their use and amusement were provided
spittoons of infinite capacity and generous gape. Most of the men
wore frock-coats and top-hats--the things that we in India put on at a
wedding-breakfast, if we possess them--but they all spat. They spat on
principle. The spittoons were on the staircases, in each bedroom--yea,
and in chambers even more sacred than these. They chased one into
retirement, but they blossomed in chiefest splendor round the bar, and
they were all used, every reeking one of them.

Just before I began to feel deathly sick another reporter grappled me.
What he wanted to know was the precise area of India in square miles. I
referred him to Whittaker. He had never heard of Whittaker. He wanted it
from my own mouth, and I would not tell him. Then he swerved off, just
like the other man, to details of journalism in our own country. I
ventured to suggest that the interior economy of a paper most concerned
the people who worked it.

"That's the very thing that interests us," he said. "Have you got
reporters anything like our reporters on Indian newspapers?"

"We have not," I said, and suppressed the "thank God" rising to my lips.

"Why haven't you?" said he.

"Because they would die," I said.

It was exactly like talking to a child--a very rude little child. He
would begin almost every sentence with, "Now tell me something about
India," and would turn aimlessly from one question to the other without
the least continuity. I was not angry, but keenly interested. The man
was a revelation to me. To his questions I returned answer