d to see you--have been _thinking_ of you to-day!" or,
"I'm glad to see you've been elected Mayor of the city!" when in fact
they mean, "Curse you, I wish you had been defeated!" Compliments
_pass_, they say, when _gentlemen_ meet, but, as there are so many
counterfeit gentry around, now-a-days, you may bet high that half the
_compliments_ that _pass_ are--_mere bogus!_

Hotel Keeping.

Fortunes are made--very readily, it is said, in our large cities, by
Hotel keeping. It does look money-making business to a great many
people, who stop in a large hotel a day or two, and perhaps, after
eating about two meals out of six--walking in quietly and walking out
quietly--no fuss, no feathers, find themselves _taxed_ four or five
dollars!

We have had occasion to know something of travel and travellers, hotels,
hotel-keepers and their bills, and it _has_ now and then entered our
head that money was or could be made--in the hotel business. We _have_
stopped in houses where we honestly concluded--we got our money's worth,
and we have again had reason to believe ourselves grossly shaved, in a
"first-class" hotel, at two dollars a day--all hurry-scurry, poked up in
the cock-loft, mid bugs, dirt, heat and effluvia, very little better
than a Dutch tavern in fly time.

We did not fail to observe at the same time, that cool impudence and
clamor had a most mollifying effect upon landlord and his _attaches_,
the tinsel and mere electrotypes passing for real bullion, galvanized
_hums_ by their noise and pretensions faring fifty per cent. better for
the same _price_--than the more republican, quiet and human wayfarer.

Under such auspices, it is not at all wonderful that ourself and scores
of others, paying two dollars and a half per diem, got what we could
catch, while Kossuth, and a score of his followers, fared and were
favored like princes of a monarchical realm--"though all _dead heads!_"

Hotels now-a-days must be _showy_, abounding in tin foil, Dutch metal
and gamboge, a thousand of the "modern improvements"--mere clap-trap,
and as foreign to the solid comforts of solid people, as icebergs to
Norwegians or "east winds" to the consumptive. Without the show, they
would be quite deserted; men will pay for this _show_, must pay for it,
and all this show costs money; Turkey carpets, life-size mirrors,
ottomans and marble slabs, from dome to kitchen, _draw well_, and those
who indulge in the dance, must pay the piper.

The f