a commissionnaire at my hotel. It required five
minutes to explain the matter to him. He discussed the matter with
the _portier_. The portier is quite buried under gold lace and brass
buttons. The commissionnaire returns to me. He thinks he knows what
I require, but is not quite certain. All this trouble for a bit of
blotting-paper! It is so with everything. Every little matter of
every-day life, which at home to think of and do are almost identical,
here costs so much time, labor and anxiety! My strength is all gone
when I have purchased a paper of pins and a bottle of ink. Breakfast
and dinner task me to the utmost. The slightest deviation from
established custom seems to act on the people at the restaurant like
a wrong figure in a table of logarithms. It required three days to
convince a stunted boy in a long-tailed coat that I did not wish beer
for dinner. He would bring beer. I would say, "I don't want beer!
I want my--some dinner." He would depart and take counsel with the
head-waiter, and I would feel as if I had been doing something for
which I ought to be corrected. The latter functionary approaches
and exclaims with domineering voice, "Vat you vants?" I reply with
meekness, "Dinner, sir, if you please." He brings me an elegantly
bound book containing the bill of fare. But it is in German: I look at
it knowingly: Sanscrit would be quite as intelligible. I put my
finger on a word which I suppose means soup. I look up meekly at the
functionary. He glowers contemptuously upon me. He recommends me to an
underling, and bustles off to guests more important. There are in the
dining-hall French, German, Italian, English and Japanese. Tongues,
plates, knives and forks clatter inside--wheels roll, rumble and
clatter over the stony pavement outside. I wait for my soup. Hours
seem to lag by. I appeal in vain to other waiters. Life is too busy
and important a matter with them to pay any attention to me.

The aristocratic German waiter is cool and indifferent. It is beneath
his dignity to approach you within half an hour after you sit down. He
knows you are hungry, and enjoys your pangs. He is sensible of every
signal, every expression of the eye with which you regard him. To
appear not to know is the chief business of his life. He will with
the minutest care arrange a napkin while a half dozen hungry men at
different tables are trying to arrest his attention. Before I met this
man my temper was mild and amiable: I believed