or four.  The most elaborate dinner, served in the most gorgeous china, is sometimes spoiled by the Draconian regulation that it must be devoured between the unholy hours of twelve and two, or have all its courses brought on the table at once.  Though the Americans invent the most delicate forms of machinery, their hoop-iron knives, silver plated for facility in cleaning, are hardly calculated to tackle anything harder than butter, and compel the beef-eater to return to the tearing methods of his remotest ancestors.  The waiter sometimes rivals the hotel clerk himself in the splendour of his attire, but this does not render more appetising the spectacle of his thumb in the soup.  The furniture of your bedroom would not have disgraced the Tuileries in their palmiest days, but, alas, you are parboiled by a diabolic chevaux-de-frise of steam-pipes which refuse to be turned off, and insist on accompanying your troubled slumbers by an intermittent series of bubbles, squeaks, and hisses.  The mirror opposite which you brush your hair is enshrined in the heaviest of gilt frames and is large enough for a Brobdignagian, but the basin in which you wash your hands is little larger than a sugar-bowl; and when you emerge from your nine-times-summoned bath you find you have to dry your sacred person with six little towels, none larger than a snuff-taker’s handkerchief.  There is no carafe of water in the room; and after countless experiments you are reduced to the blood-curdling belief that the American tourist brushes his teeth with ice-water, the musical tinkling of which in the corridors is the most characteristic sound of the American caravanserai.

If there is anything the Americans pride themselves on—­and justly—­it is their handsome treatment of woman.  You will not meet five Americans without hearing ten times that a lone woman can traverse the length and breadth of the United States without fear of insult; every traveller reports that the United States is the Paradise of women.  Special entrances are reserved for them at hotels, so that they need not risk contamination with the tobacco-defiled floors of the public office; they are not expected to join the patient file of room-seekers before the hotel clerk’s desk, but wait comfortably in the reception-room while an employee secures their number and key.  There is no recorded instance of the justifiable homicide of an American girl in her theatre hat.  Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex.  But even this gorgeous medal has its reverse side.  Few things provided for a class well able to pay for comfort are more uncomfortable and indecent than the arrangements for ladies on board the sleeping cars.  Their dressing accommodation is of the most limited description; their berths are not segregated at one end of the car, but are scattered above and below those of the male passengers; it is considered tolerable that they should lie with the legs of a strange, disrobing man dangling within a foot of their noses.