32 THE ASTOR HOTEL. 



an apparatus for craning the occupants of the higher 

 buildings up to their apartments, and in this hotel, as the 

 story goes, "a gentleman not feeling well had gone to 

 bed, and ordered a cup of tea to be brought to him. This 

 order entailing considerable travel or a sort of treadmill 

 on the (Anglice) waiter, that gentleman, being of course 

 free in every sense of the word, hated trouble, so he put 

 the order on one side, and the tea was left unapplied for. 

 Six weeks after the written request the card for tea turned 

 up, and the general or colonel behind the bar having is 

 sued a desire that it should be furnished to the gentle 

 man in Room 742, a waiter took it up, and found only 

 the remains of a customer ; for the gentleman who once 

 wished for tea could not drink it. having no stomach for 

 it, as he had been dead six weeks." 



I went to see this huge building, and found that it was 

 not only an hotel, but also a sort of inclosure for the so 

 ciety it temporarily contained, insomuch as a promenade 

 of its inhabitants took place every evening in the long 

 passage round the hotel ; a very interesting proceeding, 

 I should conceive, to any occupant desiring quiet. Many 

 of the doors of the respective apartments opening into 

 this public highway, of course the measured tread of peo 

 ple arm in arm was, to the imaginative listener, as the 

 march of soldiers, and while it continued rest was out 

 of the question. The larger the hotels, the greater 

 number of loungers there are in the entrance-halls, seated 

 in every attitude not designed by nature to give them 

 rest their shoulders, and at times the backs of their 

 heads, being those portions of the human frame applied to 

 chairs and benches used by Englishmen to be sat on in a 

 more natural way. In one of these large halls, where 

 everybody is lounging, smoking, and chewing tobacco, if 



