“I have no objection to confessing that, although I am a brother in the art, and have stayed several times at his hotel, I have never once been allowed to catch a glimpse of his features.  The head-waiter, happily, is just the contrary.  It is he who manages the hotel, receives travellers, and arranges for their well-being.  He is a handsome fellow, with a fresh complexion, heavy moustache, and one lock of hair artificially arranged on his forehead.  He is perfectly conscious of his own good looks, and wears rings on both his hands.  Nature has endowed him with a sonorous baritone voice, the notes of which, whether sharp or melodious, he is careful in expressing, because he is charmed with his art, and has an idea that it is fearfully egotistical to conceal such treasures.  One note especially he never fails to utter distinctly, and that is the last—­the note of payment.

“Sometimes he allows himself to become so absorbed in his art that he forgets the presence in the hotel of tired travellers, and disturbs their slumbers by loud roulades and cadences; or perhaps he is asked to fetch a bottle of beer, he stops on the way to the cellar to perfect the harmony of a scale, and does not return till the patience of the customer is exhausted.  But who would have the heart to complain of such small grievances when the love of song is stronger than any other?”

I had no such fortune in Holland.  No hotel proprietor rhymed for me, no waiter sang.  My chief friends were rather the hotel porters, of whom I recall in particular two—­the paternal colossus at the Amstel in Amsterdam, who might have sat for the Creator to an old master—­urbane, efficient, a storehouse of good counsel; and the plump and wide cynic into whose capable and kindly hands one falls at the Oude Doelen at The Hague, that shrewd and humorous reader of men and Americans.  I see yet his expression of pity, not wholly (yet perhaps sufficiently) softened to polite interest, when consulted as to the best way in which to visit Alkmaar to see the cheese market.  That any one staying at The Hague—­and more, at the Oude Doelen—­should wish to see traffic in cheese at a provincial town still strikes his wise head as tragic, although it happens every week.  I honour him for it and for the exquisite tact with which he retains his opinion and allows you to have yours.

A poet landlord and an operatic head waiter, what are they when all is said beside a friendly hotel porter?  He is the Deus ex machina indeed.  The praises of the hotel porter have yet to be sung.  O Switzerland! the poet might begin (not, probably, a landlord poet) O Switzerland—­I give but a bald paraphrase of the spirited original—­O Switzerland, thou land of peaks and cow bells, of wild strawberries and nonconformist conventions, of grasshoppers and climbing dons, thou hast strange limitations!  Thou canst produce no painter, thou possessest no navy; but thou makest the finest hotel porters in the world.  Erect, fair-haired, blue-eyed, tactful and informing, they are the true friends of the homeless!—­And so on for many strophes.