personal comfort. You follow your own time and inclination, and eat
and drink when and how you please, with others or alone. The
congregate system is the exception, not the rule. It seldom ever
obtains at breakfast or tea. In many cases you have a little round
table all to yourself at these meals. But if there is a common
table for half a dozen persons, the tea and toast and other eatables
are never aggregated into a common stock. Each person if he is a
single guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate tea-pot.
The table d'hote, if there be one at all, is made up like a select
dinner party, rather early in the morning. If the guests of the
house are not directly invited, they are asked, in a tone of
hospitality, if they will join in the social meal, the only one got
up by the establishment at which the table is not mapped out in
separate holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded
by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.

The presiding and working faculty of a common English inn
distinguishes it by another salient characteristic from the hotels
of other countries. The landlady is, of course, the president of
the establishment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the
retired and family department of the house. But the actual
gerantes, or working corps, with which you have to do immediately,
are three independent and distinct personages, called the waiter,
chambermaid, and _boots_. If it were respectful to gender, these
might be called the great triumvirate of the English inn. No
traveller after a night's lodging and breakfast, will mistake or
confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials. If he
is an American, and it be his first experience of the regime, he
will be surprised and puzzled at the imperium in imperio which his
bill, presented to him on a tea-tray, seems to represent. In no