Fort Worth gazette. [volume] (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1891-1898, 1891-06-28

INNS.
Different Varieties Found in
England and Scotland.
THE CORDIAL WELCOME GIVEN.
The Guest q Creature to be Pluclred. Bull.
led and and Pfllaged-The Whole Sys-
tenn One of Grab-Only Salvation
Temperance Hotels.
Special Correspondence to the Gazette.

Special Correspondence to the Gazette
| LONDON, June Is, 1891.
| There are two classes of inns in England
| and Scotland in which the guests find com
| fort. One class comprises the great hotels
Of such cities as London, Liverpool, Glas
| gov and Edinburgh, which have become
comfortable, during the past quarter of {
| 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 IN
/, known dales and glens of bonnie old Scotch
clachans, and OF rose uncovered English
hamlets. where one thanks God, If he have
come by design or accident, for the tender
repose and best rest to be found among
them.
There is another class. Its inns are the
hostels the traveller, commercial or uncom-
mercial, is compelled to patroniZe, and
which Lay in wait for the doomed tourist
from Lands End to John o'Groat's. They
are simply places where one, for a neces-
sary period, resigns himself to captivity,
surveillance and extortion. The unfeigned
and tremendous surprise and indignation
evinced at protest against either, are ele-
ments Of humor in the situation, if those
may exist, where there seems only opportu-
nifty for downright despair.
The effusiveness of your welcome at one
of these inns is alarming. The next in
slant you have cause for alarm, for with 4
queen s-warrant you could not find a shred
OF that gaumy, greasy, gaseous welcome
From dozen to score of grinning, jump
ing, wriggling, vociferous beings grab and
gasp and gurgle at you until you are inside
the door and outside the law, and your be-
longings have been wrenched you from and
yourself left as lone as is silence between
the stars. Then if you find them, or any
body that, without ransom, will acknow-
ledge to having ever seen them or you in
that blessed inn, you possess genius and a
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 it and deposit 1t near your carriage,
and by still other porters who assist the
scornful coachman in getting things to
rights and under way; or if you have
walked and carried portmanteau or two,
and been haunted and tainted by street.
porters and urchins for your niggardness
and efforts to destroy the customs of the
country; you will find them all there, these
Shiny, slippery human tentacles of the con-
crete British inn devil-ish, separate and
distinct notifications of the life-blood sap
pings you will be called upon in spirit and
pocket to endure.
There is the landlord, riotous in obse-
quiousness; the landlady, beaming with
smiles, but measuring your capacity for i'm
position with unerring accuracy; the head
waiter, a superior foreign being. usually a
German-French adventurer in full dress,
who performs all offices with scorn, but
now standing there with bland permissi-
bility in his face for your coming trial;
the porter and the second porter, who
grin at you this once to ever after grind;
"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 arrive and he lights up with joy at
the misery he alone can cause you; a
half dozen odorous stablemen, who each
watch their chance to leer and pull their
forelocks at you in effort to establish secret
recognition of what you may expect if YOU
do not placate them; the bar-maid, 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
writing recognition of what is to
come; and a 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 De consigned
In a moment the cold realism of your sit
uation has come. You are inside a low,
dark, narrow hall and alone At one side
is the bar, an affair constructed like an
American railway-station newsstand
which is shut out of sight whenever the
bar-maid wishes to yawn, the landlady de.
sires to abuse her Boniface, or your own
objurgations become too numerous and de-
cisive Opposite is the coffee room,r
1Nxry OH xx-sf
cherries table, spread with a cloth ever
decorated with misplaced matter. If you
have the good fortune to finally get any
thing to eat in the place, you will have to
partake of it with blowsy tourist possess
ing one sofa, a drunken guest snoring upon |
another, a crowd of drovers, of politicians |
or of the constabulary or military, swig- |
ging ale or stout beside you, and the |
whole room as blue as channel-fog with |
the smoke of tobacco. Directly you are in |
the prison-like hall The head waiter has |
gone; the porter has grabbed your luggage |
and disappeared; ''boots" and ''buttOns' |
have vanished; landlord, landlady and bar |
maid have been swallowed up in the incon-
ceivable somewhere behind the bar; stable |
men and chambermaidS are whisked into |
retreats. Great, gloomy |
doors, black, mouldy walls, hard, forbid
ding ceilings, alone confront you. You |
bang your knuckles against the bar
window. Landlord, landlady or bar
maid, by and by appears, giving you a
look of panied surprise, and then disap-
pears. You call, Porter !''-s'Boots !'--
Buttons l''-"Chambermaidr There is
not even a reproving glance now in answer.
You call and bang some more. This time
echo alone reproves you. Cropping about |
.he place. you snatch at bell-cord big as
your wrist, with tassel as big as your
mead. This you tug at very violently The
lang and clamor of the bell, which you
:annot locate, fill the whole place. The
comes up with slam, goes
Town with a slam, and an
expression of disgust and dismay is caught
escaping between the slams. Then, peer
ng up from, dark stairways, and peering
,ut of quickly-opened doors, are seen faces
FULL OF GRAVE SURPRISE;
-ou hear all about your ordinations of |
:sr1,st and disrna1,. and in another. i,,staxs |