Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 December 1884 — London’s “Private Hotels.” [ARTICLE]

London’s “Private Hotels.”

A few London hotels are very dear, such, for instance, as the elite of the “private hotels” about Piccadilly. In these, which are all small, everything is scrupulously neat and intensely English. There are no public drawingrooms or parlors, but all guests are expected to take private ones or whole suites. The attendance is of the best—that is to say, the waiters and maids are more like perfect automata than anything which discipline has ever produced in humanity. The landlord or landlady is the invisible mainspring of the whole. One may live of or months in the house and not be aware of their existence.

These places are, in fact, a sublimed form of the lodging-house—there ia almost nothing about them which suggests to an American his idea of an' hotel. There is often no billiard or even a smoking-room, no table d’hote. In these during the season the aristocracy, pur sang, can conceal themselves in perfect seclusion from all save those whom they wish to see. Many or most of these are kept by* ex-butlers who have been for years in the service of the nobility, and have, while there, married ladies’ maids. Thus they are perfectly qualified for their clientele. Life in these places is perfectly comfortable, in absolutely good form, but, unless one has many friends, intolerably dull. — Cor. Chicago Tribune.