Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1911 — FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE

EVERY summer thousands Of Americans make their initial trips across the Atlantic to tour , Europe. All bad sailors know the moment when it is best to seek a chair and keep still, if the situation is to be saved. The man in the picture has reached this stage. All would probably be well had not the woman with the baby dropped the feeding-bottle. Her maid, in the background, Is past hope. The man’s duty is clear. But, then if he moves? One of the most interesting features of an American’s first European tour is the comparison of transatlantic customs in hotel and railway with those of the land of the brave and the home of the free. Many things that to the seasoned traveler have become com- 1 monplace long ago strike the tourist on his Initial trip as highly amusing. CoL Brotherton of Kentucky, for instance, had been recommended to a quiet Italian hotel. Returning late from San Carlo, where almost every tourist goes on his first night in Naples, he was amazed in passing along the corridor to see outside nearly every door in addition to the boots on the floor sundry dress skirts and trousers hung upon large branching brass hooks. A garcon who was sitting in the corridor tried in broken English to explain it was the custom for travelers to leave the clothing they had worn during the day outside their doors to be brushed. But the colonel was incredulous. “Never saw anything like it in America,” he said. “Likely as not it’s some sort of skin game, and all those fools will wake up in the morning and And their clothes stolen. Not I! I’ll brush my own.”

Wouldn’t Leave Her Key. Miss Clarissa Blythe of Vermont was perfectly astounded at having her chambermaid rush after her as she carefully deposited the key of her room in her beaded reticule, and exclaimed: "But, madam! Please leave your key beside the door. I must have itto go in and do your room.” “But where is yodr passkey?” ahe demanded. “I have none,” the maid replied. “See,” she said, pointing to the hook at the side of the door, the same hook dedicated to skirts and trousers, "you must hang your key here when you go out" An Englishman who was sailing from Boston not long ago was reduced to one pair of really comfortable boots. These he placed outside his door to be polished on the eve of his departure, and be woke in the cold gray dawn to find his boots gone and not a porter in the hotel who could trace them. He was forced to descend in his slippers and buy a new pair of stiff, uncomfortable boots to wear to the steamer, and to this day be has not ceased to curse American hotels. In Germany one of the up to date hotels has a little locker in every guest room between the bedroom and the corridor, with a door on either side. He opens the door in his room, puts In his trousers and boots or whatever clothing needs attention. The valet passes along the corridor, opens each door with his own pass key, and removes the clothing to brush it, returning it and locking the door carefully upon it, and when the owner awakes he has only to open his little door, and there are his clothes all ready for him. The European bed always strikes the uninitiated American traveler as a huge joke. In France they commence to impress him with their height and narrowness and he looks dubiously at the enormous Turkey-red cotton "couvre-pled” of' eiderdown which looks something like a mountain; and he wonders how be is ever going to bear all that extra weight on his person. But when he has slipped between the sheets and the grateful

warmth communicates Itself to his <pld bones —If it is winter they are sure to be like icicles —he discovers that it is deceptively light and deliciously comfortable. In Switzerland thp beds attain a little more height, but it is in Germany that they become |>f such an altitude as to necessitate a pair of steps to mount them. Tricks Played on the Traveler. Sometimes in European hotels the tourist is taken solemnly to one side and told that by paying a few francs or lire more he can have the royal bedchamber. A certain hotel in Sorrento, where a dozen or more royal heads have lain in one season, is even more generous, for if the rooms are empty they make no extra charge. And the traveler lives to recount when he is back on his native heath how his cheek pressed the same pillow that had been used hy the little queen of Holland or the king of Saxony. But that is not a purely European custom, for to this day in a certain Boston hotel the sacred chamber occupied by Prince Henry of Prussia is listed at about $lO a day more than any other room in the house. Most American travelers on their first trips abroad are astounded when upon the day of their departure from a hotel they are presented with their bill by the head waiter instead of by the landlord or by his chief clerk. - But it is the custom and this important individual is thus assured of his tip. The traveler thinks it a little strange that coffee is always extra at luncheon and dinner, but when he orders coffee, at an average of S or t cents extra, the cup, it is freshly made expressly for him and is not the coffee that has stood for hours in the pot.' Another thing -that strikes him as funny is the fact that there are elevators to go up, but that he cannot use them to go down. One European sign in a small hotel reads: “No one is allowed to descend in the elevator but invalids and the aged.” In the larger hotels the lifts are used as they are in America, but so leisurely are they that one usually prefers to run downstairs on shank’s mare. r Economy in lights is another trait, and where, as usual, there are two electric lights In the. room. one., oyer the bed to read by and another in the ceiling, one cannot be turned on without turning the other off- But a young American engineer solved the difficulty by unscrewing the porcelain cap of the switch and sticking In a hairpin to make the connection. He had two lights, and no one was ever the wiser. And his conscience? It never troubled him at all; it .was. one of those elastic ones you read about It does not take long to remember, after you once know, that if you want to buy salt in Italy you must go to a tobacco shop to get it; for both salt and tobacco are government monopolies. And it > a pleasure to learn that In France you can buy stamps and postcards at tobacco shops, which are under government jurisdiction there as well. Also that in both countries you can send telegrams at as low a rate as 14 cents for ten words, and that special delivery letters will go for 6 cents in Paris if you remember to write across your envelope "Pneumatique,” which means that .the letter will be shunted through a pneumatic tube in no time at all, and delivered almost as soon as a telegram.