Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1891-06-28
THE WEB OF A SPIDER
For the Poor Little Fly Is Not Worse
Than an English Inn
FOR THE CONFIDING TOURIST.
Wakeman Delivers Himself of Some of His
Unlucky Experiences.
TEMPERANCE INNS ALONE ARE DECENT
CORRESPONDENCE OF THE p1spArcH.J

| LONDON, June 16.-There are two classes
of inns in England and Scotland in which
the guests find comfort One class COM
prises the great hotels of such cities as Lon
don, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh,
which have become comfortable, during the
past quarter of a century, in proportion to
their adoption of American hotel manners
and improvements. The other class is the
humble and simple hotels of remote villages,
of almost unknown dales and glens, of bon
ME old Scotch /clachans and of rose-embow-
cred English hamlets, where one thanks
God, if he have come by design or accident,
for the tender repose and blest rest to be
found among them.
There is another class. It's inns are the
hotels the average traveller, commercial or
uncommercial, is compelled to patronize,
and which lie in wait for the doomed tour
ist from Lands End to John O'Groat's.
They are simply places where one for a
necessary period resigns himself to captiv-
ity, surveillance and extortion. The un-
feigned and tremendous surprise and indig-
nation evinced at protest against either, are
elements of humor in the situation, if those
may exist where there seems only opportu-
nifty for downright despair.
The Welcome a Spider Gives a Fly.
The effusiveness of your welcome at one
of these inns is alarming. The next instant
you have cause for alarm, for with a queens
warrant you could not find a shred of that
gaumy, greasy, gaseous welcome. From a
dozen to score of grinning, Jumping,
wriggling, vociferous beings grab and gasp
and gurgle at you until you are inside the
door and outside the law, and your belong
ings have been wrenched from you, and
yourself left as lone as is silence between
the stars. Then if you find them, or any
body that without ransom, will acknowledge
to having ever before seen them or you in
that blessed inn, you possess genius and
great brave and patient soul
If you have come to the inn by carriage
and been mulcted by the station porters for
bringing your baggage to the door, by other
porters who grab it and carry it to some
other place, by other porters who now seize
1t and deposit it near your carriage, and by
still other porters who assist the scorful
coachman in getting things to rights and
under way; or if you have walked and car
ried portmanteau or two, and been haunted
and taunted by street porters and urchins
for your nlggardness and efforts to destroy
the customs of the country; you will find
them all there, these Shiny, slippery human
tentacles of the concrete British inn devil
fish, separate and distinct notifications of
the life blood sappings you will be called
upon in spirit and pocket to endure.
Every Soul Ready Vampire.
There is the landlord, riotous in obse-
quiousness; the landlady, beaming with
smiles, but measuring your capacity for
imposition with unerring accuracy; the
head waiter, superior foreign being, us
ually German-French adventurer in full
dress, who performs all Offices with scorn,
but now standing there with bland per-
instability in his face for your coming trial;
the porter and the second porter, who
grin at you this once to ever after grin;
''boots," that sodden, grimy slave who
never sleeps and who is ever at war with
all other souls within the place; "but-
tons," in uniform as to clothing, but in
permanent gloom as to face, save when
you arriye and he lights up with joy at
the misery he alone can cause you;
half dozen odorous stablemen, who each
watch their chance to leer and pull their
torelocks at you in effort to establish Sc
cret recognition of what you may expect
if you do not placate them; the barmaid,
who knows, you know, that it is she alone
who supplies the awful voluminousness and
minuteness of that inevitable bill, and who
giggles and gyrates as she sees your own
writhing recognition of what is to come;
and number of muscular cattle called
chambermaids, who in trice have settled
the manner in which you shall be racked
and wrecked within the precincts of the
dank, clammy den to which you are certain
to be consigned.
In moment the cold realism of your
situation has come. You are inside low,
dank narrow hall and alone. At one side
is the bar, an affair constructed like an
American railway station newsstand, which
is shut out from sight whenever the bar
maid wishes to yawn, the landlady desires
to abuse her Boniface, or your own objur.
cations become too numerous and decisive.
Lucky to Get Anything to Eat.
Opposite is the ''coffee room," a long, low,
cheerless place, with long, low, cheerless
table, spread with q cloth ever decorated
with misplaced matter. If you have the
good fortune to finally get anything to eat
in the place, you will have to partake of it
with blowsy tourist possessing one sofa, a
drunken guest snoring upon another,
crowd of droyers, of politicians or of the
constabulary or military, swigging ale or
stout beside you, and the whole room as
blue as channel fog with the smoke of to-
bacco. Directly you are in the prison-like
IL.
has grabbed your luggage and Disappeared;
'boots' and "buttons" have vanished; land
lord, landlady and barmaid have been swal-
lowed up in the inconceivable somewhere
behind the bar; stablemen and chamber
maids are whisked into undiscoverable re-
treats. Great, gloomy doors, black, ,mouldy
walls, hard, forbidding ceilings, alone con-
front you. You bang your knuckles against
the bar window. Landlord, landlady or bar
maid by and by appears, giving you look
of panied surprise, and then disappears.
You call, "Porterp'- "Bootsp'-'Buttons!
-"Chambermaidp' There is not even a
reproving glace now in answer You call
and bang some more. This time echo alone
reproves you. Cropping about the place,
you snatch at bellcord big as your wrist,
with tassel as big as your head. This you
tug at very violently. The clang and clamor
of the bell, which you cannot locate, fill the |
whole place. The bar-window comes up
with slam, goes down with slam, and an |
expression of disgust and dismay is caught |
escaping between the slams. Then, peering |
up from dark stairways, and peering out Of |
quickly-opened DOORS are seen faces full of |
grave surprise: you hear all about you ex- |
CARNATIONS of disgust and dismay, and in |
another instant all these faces are gone, and |
you are again alone. Then you talk out |
loud to yourself for awhile in rude Ameri- |
can words.
Noise Gives No Relief at All.
Strengthened, you return to the big bell
cord. You jerk and jerk at that. You find |
other bellcords and jerk at them Nearly |
all of them ring bells, bells of such awful
size and sound, and, in instances, such
startling nearness, that you are scared at