the public save money and are better served than by
our system. One of our consuls told me that a portier of a great Berlin
hotel paid five thousand dollars a year for his position, and yet
cleared six thousand dollars for himself. The position of portier in the
chief hotels of Saratoga, Long Branch, New York, and similar centers of
resort, would be one which the holder could afford to pay even more than
five thousand dollars for, perhaps.

When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen years ago, the
salary system ought to have been discontinued, of course. We might make
this correction now, I should think. And we might add the portier, too.
Since I first began to study the portier, I have had opportunities to
observe him in the chief cities of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy;
and the more I have seen of him the more I have wished that he might be
adopted in America, and become there, as he is in Europe, the stranger's
guardian angel.

Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago, is just as true today: "Few
there be that can keep a hotel." Perhaps it is because the landlords and
their subordinates have in too many cases taken up their trade without
first learning it. In Europe the trade of hotel-keeper is taught. The
apprentice begins at the bottom of the ladder and masters the several
grades one after the other. Just as in our country printing-offices the
apprentice first learns how to sweep out and bring water; then learns
to "roll"; then to sort "pi"; then to set type; and finally rounds
and completes his education with job-work and press-work; so the
landlord-apprentice serves as call-boy; then as under-waiter; then as
a parlor waiter; then as head waiter, in which position he often has to
make out all the bills; then as clerk or cashier; then as portier. His
trade is learned now, and by and by he will assume the style and dignity
of landlord, and be found conducting a hotel of his own.

Now in Europe, the same as in America, when a man has kept a hotel
so thoroughly well during a number of years as to give it a great
reputation, he has his reward. He can live prosperously on that
reputation. He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of
shabbiness and yet have it full of people all the time. For instance,
there is the Hotel de Ville, in Milan. It swarms with mice and fleas,
and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough
to start another one with. The food would create an i