AN ENGLISH WAITER.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3129, 8 July 1881, Page 4

AN ENGLISH WAITER.

In London there is a kind of hotel of which we have no counterpart in the United States. This hotel is usually located in some semi-aristocratic side street, and wears no badge of its servitude beyond a large, well-kept brass door plate, bearing the legend ' Jones's Hotel,' or ' Brown's Hotel,' as the case may be; but be it Brown or Jones, he has been dead fifty years, and the

establishment is conducted by Robinson. Thcro is no colfee room or public dining room, or even office, in this hotel; the commercial traveller is an unknown quantity there ; your meals are served in your apartments ; the furniture is solid and comfortable, the attendance admirable, the cuisine unexceptionable, and tho hill most abominable. But for ease, quietness, and a sort of 1812 odour of respectability, this hotel has nothing to compare with it in the_ wide world. It is here that the intermittent homesickness you contracted on the Continent will be lifted out of your bosom ; it is here will be unfolded to you alluring vistas of the substantial comforts that surround the private lives of prosperous Britons ; it is here, above all, that you will be brought in contact with Smith. It was on out arrivnl in London, one April afternoon, that the door of what looked like a private mansion, in D street, wis thrown open to ns by a boy broken out all over with buttons. Behind this hoy stood -Smith. I call him simply Smith for two reasons : in the first place because it is convenient to do so, and in the second place because that is what he called himself. I wish it were as facile a matter to explain how this seemingly unobtrusive person instantly took possession of us, bullied us with his usefulness, and knocked us down with hiu urbanity. From the moment he stepped forward to relieve us of our hand luggage we were his—and remained his until that other moment, some weeks later, when he handed us our parcels again, and stood statuesque on the door-step, with one finger lifted to his forehead in decorous salute, as we drove away. Ah, what soft despotism was that, wl'iv-h was exercised for no other end than to anticipate our requirements—to invent new wants for us only to satisfy them! If I anywhere speak lightly of Smith, if I rake exception to bis preternatural gravity (of which I would not have him moult a feather), if I allude invidiously to his life-long struggle with certain rebellious letters of the alphabet, it is out of sheer envy and regret that we have nothing like him in America. We have Niagara, and the Yosemite, and Edison's electric light (or shall have it, when we get it), but we have no Wined serving men Kke Smith. He is the result of older and vastly more complex social conditions than ours. His training began in the feudal ages. An atmosphere charged with machicolated battlements and cathedral spires was necessary to his perfect development—that, and generation after generation of lords and princes and wealthy country gentlemen for him to practise on. He is not, possible in New England. Ihe very cut of his features is unknown among us. It has been remarked that each trade and profession had its physiognomy, its own proper face. If you look closely you will detect a family likeness running through the portraits of Grarrick and Kean and Booth and Irving. There's the self-same sabre-like flash in the eye of Marlborough and Bonapai'te —the same resolute labial expression. Every lackey in London might be the son or brother of any oi-Vi«» r lackey. Smith's father, and his father's father, n. n a so on back to the grey dawn of England, were serving •tien, and each in turn lias been stamped with the immutable trade murk of his clas*. Waiters (like poets) are born, not made ; and they have not had time to be born in •Vmei'ica —Thos. B. Ald rich, in Atlantic.