A Tramp Abroad — Volume 07 by Mark Twain
page 91 of 159 (57%)
page 91 of 159 (57%)
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to make out all the bills; then as clerk or cashier;
then as portier. His trade is learned now, and by and by he will assume the style and dignity of landlord, and be found conducting a hotel of his own. Now in Europe, the same as in America, when a man has kept a hotel so thoroughly well during a number of years as to give it a great reputation, he has his reward. He can live prosperously on that reputation. He can let his hotel run down to the last degree of shabbiness and yet have it full of people all the time. For instance, there is the Ho^tel de Ville, in Milan. It swarms with mice and fleas, and if the rest of the world were destroyed it could furnish dirt enough to start another one with. The food would create an insurrection in a poorhouse; and yet if you go outside to get your meals that hotel makes up its loss by overcharging you on all sorts of trifles--and without making any denials or excuses about it, either. But the Ho^tel de Ville's old excellent reputation still keeps its dreary rooms crowded with travelers who would be elsewhere if they had only some wise friend to warn them. APPENDIX B Heidelberg Castle Heidelberg Castle must have been very beautiful before the French battered and bruised and scorched it two hundred |
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