An English Inn To A Solitary Traveler
Without Employment Is An Embodiment Of Dreary Desolation.
The
excuse to be made for this is that English men and women do not live
much at inns in their own country.
The American inn differs from all those of which I have made
mention, and is altogether an institution apart, and a thing of
itself. Hotels in America are very much larger and more numerous
than in other countries. They are to be found in all towns, and I
may almost say in all villages. In England and on the Continent we
find them on the recognized routes of travel and in towns of
commercial or social importance. On unfrequented roads and in
villages there is usually some small house of public entertainment
in which the unexpected traveler may obtain food and shelter, and in
which the expected boon companions of the neighborhood smoke their
nightly pipes and drink their nightly tipple. But in the States of
America the first sign of an incipient settlement is a hotel five
stories high, with an office, a bar, a cloak room, three gentlemen's
parlors, two ladies' parlors, and a ladies' entrance, and two
hundred bedrooms.
These of course are all built with a view to profit, and it may be
presumed that in each case the originators of the speculation enter
into some calculation as to their expected guests. Whence are to
come the sleepers in those two hundred bed-rooms, and who is to pay
for the gaudy sofas and numerous lounging chairs of the ladies'
parlors?
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