are situated, as a rule, on the main streets. There are always rooms where one may from the windows look upon the crowds passing and repassing. Thus a drama of ever-changing life can be comfortably witnessed from an armchair placed at the right point of observation. There is no such thing as loneliness. Almost everyone is ready, more than ready, to converse with you. If you yourself are courteous and civil you will probably find those around you equally so, whether they be guests or belong to the establishment. With a little tact and judgment you can always obtain useful information. My experience likewise is that the information is invariably correct: for there never seems to be any hesitation in a negative reply when those you address are not acquainted with the particular point of inquiry. The gentleman who presides over the cigars, the controller of the papers and the photographs and the official of the bar, an important field of action in a high class hotel, each and all make it a point of duty impressively to patronize your local ignorance when you ask for information. In an English hotel the general rule is for no one person to speak to another. If you do venture on the proceeding, Heaven only knows what reply you may receive. In the class divisions of the Mother Country there may be social danger in not observing the lines defined by etiquette. There are always men of good address and appearance who are not unknown to the police, and whose photographs may be destined at no distant period to figure in the Rogues’ Gallery. But such men are to be found in all countries. Whatever necessity there may be for prudence and circumspection, it has struck me that there is really no ground for that absolute uncompromising offensiveness of manner which often well-meaning men in England feel bound to show to any person who addresses them, as the joke goes, “to whom they have not been introduced.” If you are quite alone very little experience in the English hotel is enough to throw you back on yourself, and to depress even a gay and blithsome nature. You walk with a listless air through the corridors, you take your meals with a sort of mechanical impassiveness which you cannot help feeling, and you seem to drop into the crowd of reserved, self-contained individuals, who act as if they thought that courtesy to a stranger was a national crime. I do not speak of the clubs, where, if you are a member, you can always meet some acquaintance. But comparatively few Canadians visit England who are club men. I know no solitude so dreary, nor any atmosphere so wearying, as that of the London hotel in a first class lateral street when you have nobody to speak to, where you can see scarcely a living soul out of the window, where the only noise is the distant rumble of vehicles in the neighbouring thoroughfare, and where, when you are tired with reading or writing, you have no recourse but to put on your hat and sally out into the street.