Their distinguishing features are that the greater part of their guests are not travellers, but lodgers and boarders; and that they have one fixed charge for all, of so many dollars a day. The dearest I entered was the Fifth Avenue Hotel at New York, which charged five dollars a day; the board consisting of five such meals as no hotel in England or Europe could supply without bankruptcy. They are enabled to do this, because they have to supply these meals for several hundred persons. And they have this large number of guests, because multitudes of families, that they may escape the expense and annoyances of house-keeping, live in the hotels, and multitudes of men in business, keeping only a counting-house or a store in the city, do the same. The cheapest I was ever in charged three dollars and a half a-day. The service is so well organised in these hotels, that you may come or go at any hour of the night; and you can get your linen washed and returned to your room in a few hours. While dressing one morning at the Sherman House at Chicago, I sent out my linen to the laundry; on going back to my room at half-past eleven, I found that it had been washed and returned. This rapidity with which the washing of linen is performed in America enables one to travel with much less than would be requisite in Europe; and it explains why one often sees people travelling in America with no more than they can carry in a little hand-bag, called, in the language of the country, a satchel. It does not, however, explain why some people in America travel with no luggage at all. Some of those whom I observed entering and leaving the cars in this light and unimpeded fashion, told me they had adopted the system because the work of the washerwoman had been advancing among them, not more in rapidity than it had done in costliness, so that it was now cheaper to get a new article, something at the same time being allowed for the old soiled one, than to send one of the same species to the laundry of the hotel. By acting on this idea they had escaped the necessity of taking with them relays of linen. I suppose this system must be an encouragement to the trade in paper shirt-collars. The difficulty as to razors, brushes, and combs, is easily met by the provision made in the barber’s shop of every hotel. The Americans are full of original ideas, and they are very great travellers; it was therefore to be expected that they would be the first people to organise and perfect a system of travelling like the birds of the air. [Sidenote: _Conversation at Meals._]