It Seems To Me That The Space
And The Furniture Are Almost Thrown Away.
At watering-places and
sea-side summer hotels they are, I presume, used; but at ordinary
hotels they are empty deserts.
The intention is good, for they are
established with the view of giving to ladies at hotels the comforts
of ordinary domestic life; but they fail in their effect. Ladies
will not make themselves happy in any room, or with ever so much
gilded furniture, unless some means of happiness are provided for
them. Into these rooms no book is ever brought, no needle-work is
introduced; from them no clatter of many tongues is ever heard. On
a marble table in the middle of the room always stands a large
pitcher of iced water; and from this a cold, damp, uninviting air is
spread through the atmosphere of the ladies' drawing-room.
Below, on the ground floor, there is, in the first place, the huge
entrance hall, at the back of which, behind a bar, the great man of
the place keeps the keys and holds his court. There are generally
seats around it, in which smokers sit - or men not smoking but
ruminating. Opening off from this are reading-rooms, smoking-rooms,
shaving-rooms, drinking-rooms, parlors for gentlemen in which
smoking is prohibited and which are generally as desolate as ladies'
sitting-rooms above. In those other more congenial chambers is
always gathered together a crowd apparently belonging in no way to
the hotel. It would seem that a great portion of an American Inn is
as open to the public as an Exchange or as the wayside of the
street. In the West, during the early months of this war, the
traveler would always see many soldiers among the crowd - not only
officers, but privates. They sit in public seats, silent but
apparently contented, sometimes for an hour together. All Americans
are given to gatherings such as these. It is the much-loved
institution to which the name of "loafing" has been given.
I do not like the mode of life which prevails in the American
hotels. I have come across exceptions, and know one or two that are
very comfortable - always excepting that matter of eating and
drinking. Taking them as a whole, I do not like their mode of life;
but I feel bound to add that the hotels of Canada, which are kept I
think always after the same fashion, are infinitely worse than those
of the United States. I do not like the American hotels; but I must
say in their favor that they afford an immense amount of
accommodation. The traveler is rarely told that a hotel is full, so
that traveling in America is without one of those great perils to
which it is subject in Europe.
CHAPTER XV.
LITERATURE.
In speaking of the literature of any country we are, I think, too
much inclined to regard the question as one appertaining exclusively
to the writers of books - not acknowledging as we should do that the
literary character of a people will depend much more upon what it
reads than upon what it writes.
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