self in the splendour of his
attire, but this does not render more appetising the spectacle of his
thumb in the soup. The furniture of your bedroom would not have
disgraced the Tuileries in their palmiest days, but, alas, you are
parboiled by a diabolic chevaux-de-frise of steam-pipes which refuse
to be turned off, and insist on accompanying your troubled slumbers by
an intermittent series of bubbles, squeaks, and hisses. The mirror
opposite which you brush your hair is enshrined in the heaviest of
gilt frames and is large enough for a Brobdignagian, but the basin in
which you wash your hands is little larger than a sugar-bowl; and when
you emerge from your nine-times-summoned bath you find you have to dry
your sacred person with six little towels, none larger than a
snuff-taker's handkerchief. There is no carafe of water in the room;
and after countless experiments you are reduced to the blood-curdling
belief that the American tourist brushes his teeth with ice-water, the
musical tinkling of which in the corridors is the most characteristic
sound of the American caravanserai.

If there is anything the Americans pride themselves on--and justly--it
is their handsome treatment of woman. You will not meet five Americans
without hearing ten times that a lone woman can traverse the length
and breadth of the United States without fear of insult; every
traveller reports that the United States is the Paradise of women.
Special entrances are reserved for them at hotels, so that they need
not risk contamination with the tobacco-defiled floors of the public
office; they are not expected to join the patient file of room-seekers
before the hotel clerk's desk, but wait comfortably in the
reception-room while an employee secures their number and key. There
is no recorded instance of the justifiable homicide of an American
girl in her theatre hat. Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood,
the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex. But
even this gorgeous medal has its reverse side. Few things provided for
a class well able to pay for comfort are more uncomfortable and
indecent than the arrangements for ladies on board the sleeping cars.
Their dressing accommodation is of the most limited description; their
berths are not segregated at one end of the car, but are scattered
above and below those of the male passengers; it is considered
_tolerable_ that they should lie with the legs of a strange, disrobing
man da