long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical
of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper
hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less
pretentious.

Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some passer-by
about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked:
"Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our
pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people
whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that
the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse
from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For
the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part
of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought
shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry
stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy
after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs,
lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.

But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps
under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun
out of the rigours of the American country hotel.

In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we
found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very
simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was
nothing more remarkable than the button of an ordinary electric bell,
which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for
ice-water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel
evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science and