THA

HAT the evil of 'tipping' has assumed unpleasant proportions on this continent, any one who travels, more particularly in the United States, must know to his cost. Indeed, on the great lines of travel, 'tipping' is as much in vogue, as on the pleasure routes of Europe. And there is this difference, that whereas in England or on the continent of Europe, you can bestow threepence upon a waiter or porter with a satisfying sense of being rather freehanded, in the United States you can not offer less than twenty or twenty-five cents and retain your self-respect. Such at least is my experience, and I dare say the experience of most travellers, though I admit that I labour under a disadvantage which may make some difference. I have the misfortune to look a greater capitalist than I am. It is perhaps my appearance that secures for me a superfluous degree of obsequiousness on the part of menials, which people who are greater capitalists than they look often fail to receive. It is true that I take a guilty pleasure in the hallucination of servants in this respect, which would be quite unalloyed if I did not find myself compelled to act up to my part, to some extent, in the matter of 'tips.' These delicate and sympathetic attentions are always followed by unmistakable appeals to my bounty. Stewards' in Pullman cars, baggage-men on steamboats, porters at hotels, waiters in restaurants—they all do it. I am so weak as to yield generally to their mute, inglorious appeals; and I doubt if the average traveller is any stronger. Of course the imbecility of yielding is obvious. When you know that a man is already adequately paid for serving you-by his employers, and through them by yourself it is absurd to pay him over again. I know exactly how I should meet that Ethiopian of the Pullman car, when, whisking some imaginary dust from my person-I having recently removed the actual dust with my own particular whisk-he extends an eloquent palm. I should sit down with an

air of abstraction, softly hum a tune, and gaze out of the window. Or, to leave no rankling sense of injury in the claimant's mind, I should force him to admit the illegality of his demand. 'My man, and also my brother,' I should say, I shall not affect to misunderstand your actions. You want twenty-five cents. Now I know you would not expect me to give you that sum unless you thought yourself entitled to it. But reflect a moment: you are not entitled to it. In whisking from my person dust which only your microscopic eye could detect, or even in making up my bed last night an hour before I wanted to retire, in pretending to blacken my boots, in misinforming me as to the number of hours the train is behind time-in all these thing you are only doing what for a certain price you have contracted to do. But I did not contract with you. Between you and me there is absolutely no privity of contract. Mr. Pullman is your man. You contract with him; he contracts with me. I pay him; he pays you. If he doesn't pay you enough, tell him so, or get another office, or strike, or do anything that is usual and proper. But don't look to me to adjust the balance between labour and capital. In spite of appearances, I assure you that I do not represent capital; not any more in fact than you, even in the most liberal use of the term, represent labour. Here we are at the station. Bless you! Farewell!' Now I can quite understand that something of this sort would be impressive. I have often told myself that this would be the manly thing to do; but, like many greater men, I have not the courage of my opinions. So I meekly pay, while I inwardly revolt, and I dare say that many people who can't afford to tip do the same. The people who have taught waiters, et hoc genus omne, to look for tips, deserve the execration of all travellers who only look like capitalists. How those get on who neither are, nor look like, capitalists, I can only imagine. They are doubtless free

from the annoyance of too much politeness; but I fancy they are often subjected to the annoyance of none at all.

As

The whisk I have referred to incidentally as furnishing a specious pretext for a tip. The whisk, instead of a blessing, threatens to become a nuisance to travellers. For example. You step from the train at some 'getting-off place'-say Albany-where you have to wait five or six hours for a train to somewhere else—-say Boston, to be particular. The steward' of the drawing-room car has dusted' you in a perfunctory way before you left it. This has cost you twenty-five cents. A few steps bring you to a large hotel. A negro meets you at the doorstep, and brandishes a whisk. You enter, and before you have time to protest or explain, you are being 'dusted' again. This annoys you, and you think that you would like to 'dust' that negro, though you don't tell him so. You know that your coat is wearing threadbare with endless and needless dusting, yet you say nothing. But you summon all your force of character, and offer your tormentor no gratuity. you walk away, quite absent-mindedly, you catch sight of his face. He is despising you. Nevertheless you are strong, and saunter to the barber's shop where you propose to wash your hands. (Query, Why doesn't somebody offer to wash your hands for you. That would be a service, after you have been travelling all day.) At the door of the barber's shop a small boy faces you. He flourishes aloft-a whisk. Good! You are desperate. Your spirit, well-nigh broken by incessant whisking, rises at last. 'Ruffian!' you exclaim in an awful voice, 'desist. The man who lays his whisk upon me save in the way of kindness-that is, the man who dares to touch me with a whisk, dies! I have been whisked to that extent that it would ruffle the feathers and the temper of an archangel. Whisked into desperation, at last my blood is up; the lion in me is roused. Be warned in time! I shall be whisked no more!' This has the desired effect. The boy retires in confusion, and the master-barber, brought to an unwonted sense of shame, admits that 'parties has to go through a deal of whisking in this hotel.' The above incident actually befell me in the free and glorious Republic-subject to one exception. I did not address the

barber's boss exactly in these terms. They are what, on subsequent reflection, I determined that I should have said.

Build thee more stately mansions, oh ! my soul is a command that nowadays might with great aptness be given to an architect or master-builder. Perhaps, 'build thee more appropriate or more congruous mansions, oh, my architect !' would be better. I wonder whether it would have any effect thus to apostrophise him, and whether it would make him see the unfitness of Mansard roofs to houses situated in the country amidst rural delights. In a city they are commanding and even stately, especially when not standing alone, as they have the great advantage of economising space, as for example, in the row of mansions on the Duke of Westminster's property in London and many other specimens nearer home. But for a country spot where one looks (alas! often in vain) for snugness and roominess and homeliness, these cold uncompromising houses are most undesirable and uncomfortable. We hear a great deal of people who 'beautify their native towns by raising pumps for the poor, building town halls and marketplaces; but we are not so often told when a town has been 'uglified,' if I may use a word coined by Lewis Carroll. And yet how much more often is this the case, only, of course, no one likes to say so, when some well-meaning philanthropist, out of the kindness of his ignorant old heart, has built some horrid and offensive structure, intended to charm the eye and satisfy the mind. How would it look if an enterprising and artistic reporter, whose soul abhorred the ugly, were to inform his readers that, 'Yesterday, Mr. C—, at a great deal of unnecessary expense, opened the fountain he has been putting up for the inhabitants of the place. This benevolent old noodle has added one more blot to our already hideous town. The fountain in question was evidently designed by a madman and reared by imbeciles. Our best wish towards it is, that it may be speedily carried away in fragments by those unhappy ones who think it a "thing of beauty" and would like bits of it as relics.' Certainly Mr. C— and all the natives of the town would be disgusted and annoyed, and the enterprising reporter would probably get discharged,

and very likely no good would have been done after all. And yet it is a very crying shame that people should build as their own wild imaginations move them to. What right has any one to shut out from his fellow creatures, bits of beauty and sunlight, and plant a huge, ungainly building in their stead? Imagine a poet or an artist who has been accustomed to take his daily walks abroad' down a certain road, at one particular spot of which he always stops to fill his senses with delight, for at that point may be seen the curve of a river, with a group of slender silver birches gracefully drooping over it, the foliage on the other side being dense and dark. One day he comes and finds that some one is building there; by-and-bye the birches are cut down, the river is no more seen, and, instead of an Italian house meeting the sight, suggestive of romance and poetry, or a pretty English cottage, bringing thoughts of a comfortable home, of love and kindness, he sees an enormous pile of bricks with meaningless gables and a straight verandah with high-flown decorations. Don't go up that straight path and ring the sharp bell, for the people who live there you may be sure are selfish; they have built selfishly, have never asked themselves, 'Am I trying to make up for shutting out a bit of Mother Nature from all who enjoyed and loved her, by doing my best to make my house a pleasant sight.' No, they have said, 'Does this house please me? Is it bigger than Mrs. R's and Mrs. I's.' If so, they are satisfied, and their aim in constructing the edifice has been attained.

-The writer of an article in the August number of the MONTHLY gives it as his opinion that Miss Mulock (Mrs. Dinah Mulock Craik) has carried her works to an elevation of moral purity, in the largest sense of the words, to which no other novelist, male or female, has ever attained. Some of the guests round the Table may share this opinion. Certainly those who have sympathized in the fortunes of 'John Halifax, Gentleman'-and few readers who can appreciate fiction of a high class have not-can hardly help feeling some friendly and grateful interest in the writer of his delightful story. I therefore expect thanks for the brief extract from a private letter which I am going to give them :

'Our family became acquainted with Dinah Mulock just after the publication of her first book, "The Ogilvies," seven-andtwenty years ago. She was then three-andtwenty, and without being regularly pretty, was wonderfully effective looking. She has of late grown extremely stout, but she was a very graceful girl at that time, with large, grey, beautiful eyes; and she sang most exquisitely, having a great talent, almost amounting to genius, for music. We soon came to see a great deal of her, and a year after our intimacy began, we introduced her to the family of her future husband, my cousin George Craik, he being then a mere boy, eleven years younger than herself. It was not till many years afterwards, when he was twenty-five and she thirty-six, that an accident which he met with resulted in their becoming attached to one another. He was travelling one winter day from Glasgow to London, when the train went off the line, and he was injured so severely that he nearly lost his life, one leg having to be cut off almost at the thigh. He was at that time a stranger to London, and Dinah was almost the only person there whom he knew, so when asked for the name of some friend to send to,. he gave her address. She came at once, and was with him from that time all through his illness. It ended in their becoming engaged, and two years after they were married. This you see was quite a piece of romance, and another incident almost as romantic has happened to her since her marriage. She has had no children of her own, but eight years ago she found a child. In the dawn of a cold January morning, a little girl nearly a year old was discovered by the roadside near her house, almost dead from exposure. Dinah took the little thing in, cared for it, and adopted it for her own. She and her husband, with their dear little Dorothy, live now in a very pretty nouse which they have built about ten miles from London. She is the most popular person in all the neighborhood. She is wonderfully energetic and helpful, and people from all quarters bring their joys and sorrows to her. You would scarcely imagine from her looks, perhaps, what a shrewd and practical woman of business she is, rapid and clear and decided in all she does. She makes a few enemies, but she makes many friends, and

-I cannot say that the advocacy of the guest at last month's Table has altogether convinced me of the advisability of keeping a diary; and, as the subject is of some importance, I should like to bespeak a little patience while I enlarge upon it somewhat. Never having kept a diary myself, it will be understood that I approach the subject from the standpoint of an outsider, dealing with it mainly, though not altogether, on 'high priori' grounds. The admission that silly people will keep silly diaries, and be thereby made sillier, or, at least, confirmed in their silliness, taken in connection with Carlyle's definition of mankind as 'mostly fools,' would lead to an inference as to the keeping of diaries too obvious to need pointing out; and it becomes a serious question for any one who meditates taking up the role of a diarist, to ascertain whether he belongs to Carlyle's majority or not. Assuming him to have settled that question to his own satisfaction, still it seems to me far from certain that keeping a diary would do him more good than harm. Even the wisest man is seldom perfectly free from an overweening sense of his self-importance; and keeping a diary can hardly do other than foster such a feeling. Your true diary must absolutely reek with Self, with the great, the eternal and irrepressible EGO. It must begin, centre, and end in SELF. It can cease to do so only by ceasing to be a diary. Such acquaintance as I have with diary-keepers, whether in the flesh, or in the spirit as embalmed in their diaries, has not furnished me with any serious exception to invalidate the axiom: Show me a diarist, and I will show you an egotist. Even if self-introspection be scrupulously avoided, and the diary be rigidly confined to events and opinions of an objective character, it can hardly help taking the form of 'I did this,' or 'I think that,' or 'So-and-so did such-and-such a thing to ME.' Events are set down, not because they are worth setting down, or of the slightest intrinsic importance, but simply because they happened to the writer. A feminine habit of mind is induced. It is axiomatic that 'women care nothing for politics except their personalities.' Most men know how difficult it is to get an average woman really

the narrow circle of her relations and ac

quaintances. The idea of humanity as a whole, or of posterity, is too wide, too impersonal for her to grasp. Keeping a diary must tend to produce a similar tone of mind. In the ordinary life of a man nowadays, it cannot be possible that something worthy the dignity of preservation in black and white will happen oftener than very rarely, let alone every day. A diary kept in accordance with the usual determination to set something down each day, must then inevitably be a record of the merest wishywashy commonplace,-a chronicle of the smallest of small beer. A narrow range of vision and a petty habit of mind will be induced. Voltaire, in his Charles XII., makes a remark to the effect that, under the operation of some law of mental perspective, men are apt to imagine that the events of their own time and country, passing as they do under their own immediate observation, are the most important that have befallen the human race since the creation of the world. In the case of the diarist, however, there is danger of the yet more grotesque result, that he will cease to be greatly interested even in the events of his own time and country, or in any save those in which he himself takes part, or in which he occupies a prominent place. An Eastern war, a famine in India, a crisis in France, will be dwarfed into the merest trifles in comparison with events so momentous as a visit to the theatre, a constitutional walk, a flirtation with a pretty girl, or a call from a frivolous acquaintance which results in the terrible record, an evening wasted.' Even when the diarist passes his life among public men and in public affairs, one can see from such an example as Greville-a man unquestionably far abler than the ordinary run-how strong a tendency there is in a diary to degenerate partly into a inere chronicle of scandal, back-biting, tittle-tattle, and backstairs gossip, and partly into a species of court of social justice-or injustice-where the diarist sets himself up on a lofty pedestal of superior wisdom and virtue, and, as selfconstituted universal censor morum, deals out his petty judgments on his whole circle of friends and acquaintances. It must have been an exquisite solace to a man like Greville, after having been ignominiously