Inasmuch As You Have A
Deadly Fear Of Being Remembered Afterward In This Hotel As A Piker,
You Continue To
Dip down and to fork over, and so by the time you
reach the tail end of the procession your
Ten per cent has grown
to twelve or fifteen per cent, or even more.
As regards the tipping of guides for their services, I hit on a
fairly satisfactory plan, which I gladly reveal here for the
benefit of my fellow man. I think it is a good idea to give the
guide, on parting, about twice as much as you think he is entitled
to, which will be about half as much as he expects. From this
starting point you then work toward each other, you conceding a
little from time to time, he abating a trifle here and there,
until you have reached a happy compromise on a basis of fifty-fifty;
and so you part in mutual good will.
The average American, on the eve of going to Europe, thinks of the
European as speaking each his own language. He conceives of the
Poles speaking Polar; of the Hollanders talking Hollandaise; of
the Swiss as employing Schweitzer for ordinary conversations and
yodeling when addressing friends at a distance; and so on. Such,
however, is rarely the case. Nearly every person with whom one
comes in contact in Europe appears to have fluent command of several
tongues besides his or her own. It is true this does not apply
to Italy, where the natives mainly stick to Italian; but then,
Italian is not a language. It is a calisthenic.
Between Rome and Florence, our train stopped at a small way station
in the mountains. As soon as the little locomotive had panted
itself to a standstill the train hands, following their habit,
piled off the cars and engaged in a tremendous confab with the
assembled officials on the platform. Immediately all the loafers
in sight drew cards. A drowsy hillsman, muffled to his back hair
in a long brown cloak, and with buskins on his legs such as a stage
bandit wears, was dozing against the wall. He looked as though
he had stepped right out of a comic opera to add picturesqueness
to the scene. He roused himself and joined in; so did a bearded
party who, to judge by his uniform, was either a Knight of Pythias
or a general in the army; so did all the rest of the crowd. In
ten seconds they were jammed together in a hard knot, and going
it on the high speed with the muffler off, fine white teeth shining,
arms flying, shoulders shrugging, spinal columns writhing, mustaches
rising and falling, legs wriggling, scalps and ears following suit.
Feeding hour in the parrot cage at the zoo never produced anything
like so noisy and animated a scene. In these parts acute hysteria
is not a symptom; it is merely a state of mind.
A waiter in soiled habiliments hurried up, abandoning chances of
trade at the prospect of something infinitely more exciting.
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