with this;
but to a Frenchman it would naturally be most remarkable. In France,
where, I venture to say, people live as well as anywhere else, if not
better, there is a horror of anything like waste of good food. It is to
me, therefore, a repulsive thing to see the wanton manner in which some
Americans will waste at one meal enough to feed several hungry
fellow-creatures.

In the large hotels, conducted on the American plan, there are rarely
fewer than fifty different dishes on the _menu_ at dinner-time. Every
day, and at every meal, you may see people order three times as much of
this food as they could under any circumstances eat, and, after picking
it and spoiling one dish after another, send the bulk away uneaten. I am
bound to say that this practice is not only to be observed in hotels
where the charge is so much per day, but in those conducted on the
European plan, that is, where you pay for every item you order. There I
notice that people proceed in much the same wasteful fashion. It is
evidently not a desire to have more than is paid for, but simply a bad
and ugly habit. I hold that about five hundred hungry people could be
fed out of the waste that is going on at such large hotels as the Palmer
House or the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago--and I have no doubt that
such five hundred hungry people could easily be found in Chicago every
day.

* * * * *

I think that many Europeans are prevented from going to America by an
idea that the expense of traveling and living there is very great. This
is quite a delusion. For my part I find that hotels are as cheap in
America as in England at any rate, and railway traveling in Pullman cars
is certainly cheaper than in European first-class carriages, and
incomparably more comfortable. Put aside in America such hotels as
Delmonico's, the Brunswick in New York; the Richelieu in Chicago; and in
England such hotels as the Metropole, the Victoria, the Savoy; and take
the good hotels of the country, such as the Grand Pacific at Chicago;
the West House at Minneapolis, the Windsor at Montreal, the Cadillac at
Detroit. I only mention those I remember as the very best. In these
hotels, you are comfortably lodged and magnificently fed for from three
to five dollars a day. In no good hotel of England, France, Germany,
Italy, Switzerland, would you get the same amount of comfort, or even
luxury, at the same price, and those who require a sitting-room get