expect the _menu_ to be
served to you; but surely you can order a steak or a chop."

No, you cannot, not even an omelette or a piece of cold meat. If you
arrive at one minute past three (in small towns, at one minute past two)
you find the dining-room closed, and you must wait till six o'clock to
see its hospitable doors open again.

* * * * *

When you enter the dining-room, you must not believe that you can go
and sit where you like. The chief waiter assigns you a seat, and you
must take it. With a superb wave of the hand, he signs to you to follow
him. He does not even turn round to see if you are behind him, following
him in all the meanders he describes, amid the sixty, eighty, sometimes
hundred tables that are in the room. He takes it for granted you are an
obedient, submissive traveler who knows his duty. Altogether I traveled
in the United States for about ten months, and I never came across an
American so daring, so independent, as to actually take any other seat
than the one assigned to him by that tremendous potentate, the head
waiter. Occasionally, just to try him, I would sit down in a chair I
took a fancy to. But he would come and fetch me, and tell me that I
could not stay there. In Europe, the waiter asks you where you would
like to sit. In America, you ask him where you may sit. He is a paid
servant, therefore a master in America. He is in command, not of the
other waiters, but of the guests. Several times, recognizing friends in
the dining-room, I asked the man to take me to their tables (I should
not have dared go by myself), and the permission was granted with a
patronizing sign of the head. I have constantly seen Americans stop on
the threshold of the dining-room door, and wait until the chief waiter
had returned from placing a guest to come and fetch them in their turn.
I never saw them venture alone, and take an empty seat, without the
sanction of the waiter.

[Illustration: THE HEAD MAN.]

The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt
their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American
hotel dining-room containing five hundred people, than you do at a
French _table d'hote_ accommodating fifty people, at a German one
containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining
_tete-a-tete_.

[Illustration: "LOOK LIKE DUSKY PRINCES."]

The head waiter, at large Northern and Western hotels, is a white man.