such. The crowded resorts do not give one a
tithe of the character or local colour to be had from a stay in some
little market-town inn of France or Germany. In the former, hotels
are simply bad imitations of Parisian establishments, while the best
are often off the beaten track in the small towns.

The question of tipping is an ever present one for the European
traveller. It exists in Britain and Continental Europe to an
increasing and exasperating extent, and the advent of the automobile
has done nothing to lessen it.

There is no earthly, sensible logic which should induce a _garcon_ in
a hotel or restaurant to think that because one arrives in an
automobile he wishes to dine in a special room off of rare viands and
drink expensive wines, but this is his common conception of the
automobile tourist. One fights up or down through the scale of hotel
servants, and does his best to allay any false ideas they may have,
including those of the hostler, who has done nothing for you, and
expects his tip, too. It's an up-hill process, and the idea that
every automobilist is a millionaire is everywhere dying hard.

The traveller demands not so much elegance as comfort, and, above
all, fit accommodation for his automobile. Some sort of a light,
airy, and clean closed garage is his right to demand, and the hotel
that supplies this, as contrasted with the one that does not, gets
the business, even if other things be _not_ equal.

The requirements of an automobile _en tour_ are almost as numerous
and varied as those of its owner. Hence the hotel proprietor must, if
he values this clientele, provide something a great deal better than
a mere outhouse, an old untidy stable-yard, or a lean-to.

Small concern is it to mine host of the local inn, who is somewhat
off the beaten track of motorcars, as to what really constitutes a
garage. He usually does not even know what the word means. Any
roofed-over shed or shack, with doors or not, is what one generally
has to put up with to-day, for housing his resplendent brassy and
varnishy automobile.

Once the writer remembers being turned into an old stable (in
England), the floor of which was strewn with the broken bottles of a
defunct local mineral water industry, and again into another, used as
a carpenter's shop, the floor strewn with the paraphernalia and tools
of the trade.

If the English hotel-keeper (again they do things better on the
Continent) only would discriminate to the e