adian hotels
without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not evidential. I
felt as if I stood indeed upon English soil, in a place where people
liked to have their meals in peace.

The process of the summons is called 'paging,' and consists of sending a
little boy with a large voice through all the halls and corridors of the
building, making them resound with a name. The custom is common, of
course, in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is a mere
whisper compared with the wail with which the American page repeats the
formula of 'Calling Mr. So and So.' I remember a particularly crowded
_parterre_ in the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of Pittsburg,
through which wandered a youth with a voice the like of which I have
never heard in the land of the living, a voice like the cry of a lost
spirit, saying again and again for ever, 'Carling Mr. Anderson.' One
felt that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there never had been
any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps he and every one else wandered in
an abyss of bottomless scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out
of numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a shadow with
shadows and wailed by impassable streams. This is not exactly my
philosophy, but I feel sure it was his. And it is a mood that may
frequently visit the mind in the centres of highly active and successful
industrial civilisation.

Such are the first idle impressions of the great American hotel, gained
by sitting for the first time in its gallery and gazing on its drifting
crowds with thoughts equally drifting. The first impression is of
something enormous and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually
tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the tameness of so
much of that social order. But I should not be recording the sensations
with sincerity, if I did not touch in passing the note of something
unearthly about that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for
the first time. It is as if he were wandering in another world among the
fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal Utopia of the future.

Yet I am not certain; and perhaps the best of all news is that nothing
is really new. I sometimes have a fancy that many of these new things in
new countries are but the resurrections of old things which have been
wickedly killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked over
the sea of little tables in some light and airy open-air