porter and the
bus driver asked me for what they regarded as their due drop of
blood. Nip! nip! Within the door of the hotel the manager
informed us that all his rooms had been engaged by telegraph,
but that he could give us good rooms at a clean hotel near by,
and we took them. Two hotel porters who had carried our bits of
hand-baggage into the hotel lobby asked me, as soon as the hotel
manager had turned his back, for their tribute. Nip! nip! Yet
another porter, after taking the things a few steps down the
street to the other hotel stood by in the hallway and waited to
give us his nip. Seven gouges of silver change out of my pocket
before we reached our rooms! But the probes of the mosquito
swarms of this hotel reached even further. The little hotel
charged us Hotel Blank rates for our rooms, about double what
would have been asked had we gone there direct and bargained for
accommodations. And the dinner at the Hotel Blank cost us half a
florin apiece more than the price set down in the guide-book. In
this incident the reader sees some, but not all, of the methods
of stinging which the hotel mosquitoes practice.

"In Berlin, just at the moment of our departure, the porter, the
gold-laced and brass-buttoned dignitary who browbeats lamblike
guests at European hotel entrances, handed us our laundry bill,
every article of which was charged double to treble New York
prices. In Vienna, tired of blood-letting to each mosquito
separately in the group of servants always assembled about the
door upon our departure--'the review' they themselves call this
evolution--I drew the manager aside and said: 'I understand
that there is a way of giving tips to all hands through the
management.' (One bleeding as it were.) 'How much extra shall I
give you?' He replied: 'Twenty per cent. of your bill.'

"BRIBE AND BE HAPPY"

"I was rather tickled than bitten the first time I got a nip in
a European railway train. One of our party suggested that as the
second-class places were crowded we should go into a first-class
compartment and await results. When the conductor, in his
jim-dandy uniform, came along, he was handed our second-class
tickets and a mark--a silver coin worth a paltry twenty-five
cents. And he took our tickets and passed on without seeing for
what class they called. The va