You are charged for candles, a franc each. You never use a candle, except during the minute necessary to disrobe for your bed, but you are charged a franc for it just the same. The more conscientious hotel manager wants to satisfy you with a new candle every night, and so he has a little machine, something like a pencil sharpener, with which he tapers off the top of the burned candle, making it look as though it had never been lighted, and charges you right over again for it. Tibbitts exasperated his landlord by putting his candle in his pocket every morning, and from the front of the hotel giving it to the first poor person who passed. But the landlord smiled grimly, in French, when he saw the little trick, and promptly instructed his clerk to charge Monsieur Tibbitts two francs a day for broken glass. [Sidenote: THE CHAMBERMAID'S TRICK.] You are to depart to-morrow morning, and you charge the clerk with great distinctness to have your bill made out before you retire. You want to go over the items and see that everything is correct. The clerk, with great suavity, assures you that it shall be done, but it isn't. You come for it and find the office closed. The next morning you arise betimes and make the same request; you say you want your bill immediately, to which the same answer is given with an apology for its not having been done the night before. You get through your breakfast--it is not yet done. Minutes fly, the carriage is at the door to take you to your train, and just as the last minute possible to catch the train is on you, it comes--as long as your arm, written in French, which you can't understand if you had time to, but which now is utterly impossible. You glance at the grand total--it is a grand total--and you pay it, objurgating because it is a trifle over twice what it should be. Then comes the long array of servants, the chambermaid, the boots, the elevator boy, the head waiter, the table waiter, and so on, all of whom expect and plumply demand recognition, and you think you are done. But you are not. Just as you are getting into the carriage, a chambermaid, not the one who had charge of your room, but her sister, appears with one of your silk handkerchiefs. "Monsieur forgot the handkerchief." She extends the handkerchief with one hand, holding out the other for a franc. You give it to her of course, knowing all the time that your own chambermaid abstracted it and gave it to her for the purpose of wringing the last possible drop of blood out of you, and that this wretch has done the same kind office for your chambermaid, to be practised upon another victim who leaves to-morrow. I presume the landlord compels a division of these swindles, for as they all lay awake nights to devise ways and means to wrench money from tourists it is not likely they would let so easy a source of revenue escape them. Here everybody takes gratuities, even excelling the English in the practice.