There were signs in our bedrooms, too. I don't remember all of them, but there was one bearing the genial invitation: _Criticize and suggest for the improvement of our service. Complaint and suggestion box in lobby._ While I was in that hotel I had nothing to "criticize and suggest," but I have been in other hotels where, if such an invitation had been extended to me, I should have stuffed the box. Besides the signs, we found in each of our rooms the following: a clothes brush; a card bearing on one side a calendar and on the other side a list of all trains leaving Buffalo, and their times of departure; a memorandum pad and pencil by the telephone; a Bible ("Placed in this hotel by the Gideons"), and a pincushion, containing not only a variety of pins (including a large safety pin), but also needles threaded with black thread and white, and buttons of different kinds, even to a suspender button. [Illustration: My companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush] But aside from the prompt service we received, I think the thing which pleased us most about that hotel was a large sign in the public wash room, downstairs. Had I come from the West I am not sure that sign would have startled me so much, but coming from New York--! Well, this is what it said: _Believing that voluntary service in washrooms is distasteful to guests, attendants are instructed to give no service which the guest does not ask for._ Time and again, while we were in Buffalo, my companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush. We became positively fond of the melancholy washroom boy in that hotel. There was something pathetic in the way he stood around waiting for some one to say: "Brush me!" Day after day he pursued his policy of watchful waiting, hoping against hope that something would happen--that some one would fall down in the mud and really need to be brushed; that some one would take pity on him and let himself be brushed anyhow. The pathos of that boy's predicament began to affect us deeply. Finally we decided, just before leaving Buffalo, to go downstairs and let him brush us. We did so. When we asked him to do it he went very white at first. Then, with a glad cry, he leaped at us and did his work. It was a real brushing we got that day--not a mere slap on the back with a whisk broom, meaning "Stand and deliver!" but the kind of brushing that takes the dust out of your clothes. The wash room was full of dust before he got through. Great clouds of it went floating up the stairs, filling the hotel lobby and making everybody sneeze. When he finished we were renovated. "How much do you think we ought to give him for all this?" I asked of my companion.