ith a
reasonable latitude of choice in time and fare, ready when desired. It
is a sensible comfort to know beforehand exactly, or almost exactly,
what one's hotel expenses will amount to.

2. The abolition of the charge for attendance.

3. A greater variety of dishes than is usually offered in any except
our very largest hotels. This is especially to be desired at
breakfast. Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred
dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of
sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. There is
probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense
in the reluctance to follow this most excellent "American lead." The
British tourist in the United States takes so kindly to the
preliminary fruit and cereal dishes of America that he would probably
show no objection to them on his native heath.

4. An extension of the system of ringing once for the boots, twice for
the chambermaid, and so on. The ordinary American table of calls goes
up to nine.

5. The provision of writing materials free for the guests of the
hotels. The charge for stationery is one of the pettiest and most
exasperating cheese-parings of the English Boniface's system of
account-keeping. If, however, he imitates the liberality of his
American brother, it is to be hoped that he will "go him one better"
in the matter of blotting-paper. Nothing in the youthful country
across the seas has a more venerable appearance than the strips of
blotting-paper supplied in the writing-rooms of its hotels.

Nothing in its way could be more inviting or seem more appropriate
than the cool and airy architecture of the summer hotels in such
districts as the White Mountains, with their wide and shady verandas,
their overhanging eaves, their balconies, their spacious corridors and
vestibules, their simple yet tasteful wood-panelling, their creepers
outside and their growing plants within. Mr. Howells has somewhere
reversed the threadbare comparison of an Atlantic liner to a floating
hotel, by likening a hostelry of this kind to a saloon steamer; and
indeed the comparison is an apt one, so light and buoyant does the
construction seem, with its gaily painted wooden sides, its
glass-covered veranda decks, and its streaming flags. Perhaps the
nearest analogue that we have to the life of an American summer hotel
is seen in our large hydropathic establishments, such as those at
Peebles or