People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1896 — THE TIPPING QUESTION. [ARTICLE]

THE TIPPING QUESTION.

How It Is Practiced at Home and Abroad and the Need For a Reform. The question of "tipping” seems small enough in detail, but rather important when exaggerated. A woman who spent last winter in one of the most sumptuous of New York hotels says she invariably gave a quarter to her waiter at breakfast and luncheon, those being meals taken alone. At dinner time she was joined by her husband, who always banded the servitor 60 cents. The latter snm seemed to evenly fill the man's idea of what was due him, and his "Thank you, sirl” was bland and gracious, but the lady’s modest quarters always found their grave in the black waistcoat pooket, with no expression of gratitude from the recipient’s faoe, which wore a meaning look, as of one who says, "Women are mean, an never knows ’ow to do the right thing by a man, but one ’as to put up with ’em.” It is only in reokless, good natured America that optional fees are so much larger than they ought to ba A dollar, which is a common enough sum for a man to give at dinner in a fashionable restaurant, would make a French waiter stare, although he would have the presence of mind to pocket it quickly. In Paris there is an unwritten scale which apportions 6 per cent on the amount of a customer’s bill as a tip. Thus a person ordering' 5 a dinner that costs $2 would, on settling his bill, add 10 cents’for the attendant. It is time we had either a legal or informal rule governing tips in this country, and it is to be hoped that some rioh persons will help on the reform. It will never be done by those whose means are really small enough to feel the tax, for it is one of the errors of the impecunious to feel obliged to show as much liberality as a millionaire, even if, like the guest in "Charley’s Aunt,” he has to borrow half a dollar from the butler with which to tip him.—lllustrated American.