Allusion has been made in preceding paragraphs to the system of gratuities that prevails in Great Britain and on the Continent. It is the greatest of all the annoyances of European travel, not so much for the money it consumes as for the perplexities it makes, and the perpetual irritation of being asked at every step to give an indefinite sum for real or fancied services. It would be a good deal mitigated if the expectants would name the exact amount they are entitled to; a regular tariff for gratuities would be a vast relief to the traveling public, but this boon is emphatically refused. The amount is always left to the stranger, partly for the reason that custom has so ordained, and partly because an avenue is thus left open for an increased demand.

The waiter is much less likely than his friend the cab-man to tell you he is under-paid, but he vouchsafes that information far more frequently than is agreeable to the traveler. He rarely speaks when conveying this reproof, but his manner is unmistakable. Occasionally he puts the money back in your hand, and declines to accept it; his manner is as lofty as the summit of Mount Blanc, and quite as cold, and to judge by his appearance his most tender susceptibilities have been sorely wounded. The novice generally soothes him by an addition to the amount of the offer, but the experienced voyager does nothing of the kind. He drops the returned cash into his pocket and turns away; the movement brings the offended dignity to his senses, and for a moment he undergoes a mental struggle over the situation. Shall he preserve his haughty manner and refuse to pursue the subject, or shall he accept what he has just declined? These are the questions that flit through his brain, and he carefully balances the pros and cons. The usual result is in favor of the last-named course, and he pockets his fee in silence and thankfulness, not unaccompanied with a sullen air.

Occurrences of this kind are more rare in England than on the Continent, and the Continent again is freer from them than the countries farther East. Perhaps the worst of all is Egypt, where "backsheesh!" ("a present") is dinned into the traveler's ears from morn till night; it is the word he first hears on his arrival, and the last at his departure, and in after years it haunts his dreams, and is by no means banished from his waking hours. Whatever he does or does not do, he is expected to pay for; services are impudently forced upon him, and then the demand for compensation is as insolent as it is exorbitant. The manner of the Egyptian Arab in this matter of backsheesh is most insulting, and the wonder is he has been allowed to practice it so long. Give him what you consider a fair return for his services, either real or fancied, and he pushes the money back into your hands and lifts his nose into the air; you have been in his estimation a miser, and your coin is unfit for him to touch. But if you drop it into your pocket and turn away, his whole attitude changes; he is no longer the proud descendant of the Mamelukes and the kings of Egypt, but the most cringing suppliant you can imagine. He begs you to give again what he has just refused, and if you persist in keeping it he has resource to tears. Not unfrequently he rolls on the ground and screams like an angry child, and he will follow you for hours in the hope that you will relent. Sometimes, instead of thrusting the money into your hand, he throws it on the ground, knowing that you will be very unlikely to stoop to pick it up; by so doing he endeavors to make sure of the original offer, and takes his chances in shaming or bullying you into giving more.

The question naturally occurs to an American, 'How shall I ascertain what is proper to give when a service has been rendered to me?' No general rule can be laid down, and the traveler must depend often on his judgment. Where it is possible to do so, you can ask any person who is familiar with the subject, and he will tell you; when this cannot be done you have only yourself to rely upon. Remember that in England and on the Continent money has a greater purchasing power than in America, and gauge your fees accordingly. Where you have engaged cabmen, guides, or other individuals whose rate of service is previously arranged, or is regulated by a tariff, you will be about right if you add ten per cent. for a gratuity. Thus a guide whose tariff is five francs a day should be satisfied with half a franc, but, if he has been specially zealous and useful, you can give him a franc with safety. The Paris cabman expects four sous additional on the course or six sous an hour; his fee is obligatory in a certain sense, as his wages are too low for him to live upon without the pour boire. The German cabman expects his trinkgeld as a matter of course, and you will really under-pay him if you do not give it. The same is the case with his class in all parts of the Continent, as well as in Great Britain, and you will fully hit the mark if you augment the regular tariff by fifteen or twenty per cent.

In the restaurants the waiters generally receive nothing in the form of wages; they rely entirely on the donations of patrons for their compensation, and the system is well understood by the public. The money thus obtained is dropped into a box at the cashier's counter, and divided among all the waiters of the establishment at the end of the week. This has been found after long experience the best way to secure uniform attention to all customers,—better than to allow each waiter to pocket the money he receives. In the latter case, a patron known to be liberal would be carefully looked after, while the man who gave only the regulation fee would be neglected. Under the present arrangement a waiter can have no great inducement to neglect the niggardly man to an undue extent, and, on the other hand, he will not be over-serviceable to the generous one. The box for the money is in full view of all the waiters, so as to prevent any frauds on the revenue; it is usually of metal, and a foot or so in height. The shape and material cause the coin to jingle when it falls, and thus the waiters can be taught by the ear as well as by the eye that the donations are properly bestowed.

A French barber shop frequently amuses the stranger on account of the way the pour boire is received. You have whatever tonsorial operation you choose, and when the work is finished you pay according to the tariff. When change has been made you leave a few sous on the counter for the inevitable extra; the cashier drops them in the metal box which stands ready for their reception, and the sound of their fall is followed by a chorus of "Merci, monsieur," from all the barbers in the place, be they few or many. Half a dozen masculine voices pronouncing those words in measured cadence have a strange effect on the ears of a novice.

In many hotels and restaurants in England, and on the Continent, not only do the servants receive no wages, but they even pay something to the proprietor for their places. In the restaurants of Vienna there is a man who is designated the "zoll-kellner," (pay-waiter) who carries a leather sack at his side to hold the coin for making change. Your accounts are settled with him, and not with the waiter who has served you, and it is to the zoll-kellner that you give your gratuities. Out of the gratuities he pays the wages of the waiters, and reimburses himself for his services, so that the attendance costs the establishment nothing. Some of the larger bier-halles in Vienna derive a revenue from the service, as they require the zoll-kellner to pay some hundreds of dollars annually for his privilege, besides giving his time and paying the waiters.

The usual fee in a restaurant on the Continent is a sou on each franc of the bill, or one sou in twenty. Thus, if you have ten francs to pay for your dinner, you give half a franc, or ten sous, to the waiter, and if you have expended only five francs you give him five sous. A sou on a franc is a good general rule; it is followed by the great majority of Frenchmen and other continental people, but you should not adhere to it by giving a single sou when you have only a franc to pay. Never give less than two sous, where you give anything at all, except to the professional beggar of whom you wish to rid yourself. The cashiers of the restaurants always arrange the change, so that you will have the material for the pour boire. Suppose your bill is exactly ten francs, and you put down a twenty-franc piece from which the amount is to be taken. The cashier sends back, not a ten-franc piece, but a five-franc piece, four francs, half a franc, and the rest in copper. Sometimes there is an attempt to cause the stranger to bleed freely by making change so that he will be compelled to give more than is necessary. Thus in the instance described above, the cashier would send back a five-franc piece and five pieces of one franc each, so as to compel a donation of a franc. Whenever this is done you can be entirely sure that it is an effort to extract more than is due; you can meet it by asking change—la monnaie—for one of the franc pieces, or better still, give the exact pour boire from the reserve you should always have in your pocket.

The regulation of the fees necessary for a hotel is more difficult than for a restaurant. The amount given should be proportioned to the time you have been in the house, the services of the waiters, the demands you have made upon them, and the size of your party. It is best to let one person of a party pay all the gratuities, and do it in a systematic way so that each servant receives his or her due. Suppose you are four in number, and have been a week in the house; you pay the concierge from five to eight francs, the chambermaid four to six, the waiter who has brought the coffee in the morning, and otherwise looked after you, five to eight, and the porter who has handled luggage and blacked your boots, five to six francs. These figures are for a fair amount of service, and are liberal enough for most cases. Every traveler must judge for himself whether he has made an undue demand upon the servants, and gauge his gratuities accordingly.

So much has been said about the fee system that some of the hotels have adopted the plan of certain English ones in announcing that the service is all included and nothing more is expected. But the pretence is a very thin one, as the departing traveler will surely ascertain. The servants come to his room while he is putting the finishing touch to his packing, they lie in wait in the halls and on the stairways, and they assemble at the door to see him off. There is often a preconcerted system of signals by which all the servants can be notified of the approaching departure of a patron of a hotel. Bells will be rung, or somebody will be called in a loud voice to bring something either real or imaginary. The writer had the following experience in a hotel in Paris:

He had been in the house nearly a week, and followed the usual custom of leaving his key with the concierge whenever he went out. If he came in in the afternoon he was usually informed that the chambermaid had the key upstairs, and on proceeding to his hall he summoned that damsel by touching a bell at the head of the stairway; the concierge never made any pretence of calling her, but simply indicated that the key was above. One afternoon he came in, asked for his key, and received the usual response that the chambermaid had it. As he turned to go upstairs he asked to have his bill made out, as he was going away immediately.

The half-asleep concierge seemed to have been struck with a shock from an electric battery. She protruded her head from the window of her office, and shouted so that she could have been heard to the uttermost parts of the house:-

"Fifine! Fifine! apportez le clef pour numero trente deux; monsieur va partir—il va partir" ("Bring the key for number 32; the gentlemen is going away; he's going away!")

The echoes of the last syllable of the last word of her call followed number 32 up the stairs to his door. When he had arranged his packing and descended, he found the servants waiting for him, with the exception of those he had already encountered on his way down. At least half of them he had never seen, but all had their hands open for any tokens of remembrance in the shape of the current coin of the country.

The custom of assembling all the servants on the departure of a traveler is descended from the Middle Ages when the retainers of a castle were summoned by the bell at the portcullis to welcome the coming and speed the parting guest. Like many another honorable usage of olden times it has suffered degradation; at present it is simply a form of extracting money from the traveler, and not one servant in a hundred is aware of its origin, or thinks of it in any other light than the practical one. The fee system to the hotel waiter had a similar origin, and is likewise a relic of feudalism. The guest at the castle of a baron of the Middle Ages was not expected to pay for his accommodation; he was in every sense a guest, and like many a guest of modern days, he often felt that he was causing a good deal of trouble and extra work on the part of the servants and retainers. Consequently he opened his purse at his departure and scattered his cash among those who had cared for him; the shell of the custom has been retained, but its sentiment is altogether gone. The patron of a hotel pays his bill, and is in no sense a "guest," as many keepers of hostelries like to call him, and the excuse for his distribution of money among the servants has the lightest possible foundation.

In high circles the habits of the olden time remain in all their purity, and princes and kings and nobles are obliged to pay heavily for their entertainment. After his sojourn in Paris in 1867, the Emperor of Russia gave 40,000 francs to be distributed among the servants of the palace where he was lodged, and the King of Italy gave 10,000 francs under similar circumstances at Vienna in 1873. American and other foreigners of distinction who visit Egypt are often honored with lodgings in one of the Khedive's palaces, or with one of his private steamers to go up the Nile. But it is bad economy to accept these courtesies, for the reason that the backsheesh to servants and officers amounts to a large figure, frequently to several hundreds of dollars. It was said of Ismail Pacha that he paid nothing to the attaches of his boats and palaces but reimbursed them by giving them an occasional distinguished visitor to pluck.

The fee system has grown into so many abuses in these latter days that several governments have passed laws restricting it, and forbidding its servants to accept fees. This is noticeable in the public galleries of France, Italy, and other countries, where no fees are demanded except a slight charge for taking care of a cane or umbrella, and sometimes an entrance fee, which is bought at a ticket-office, and must be paid by everybody who enters. At the ruins of Pompeii signs are posted in all the languages of Europe forbidding the guides to accept fees in any form under penalty of dismissal; the regulations are so stringent that no guide dares to accept a piece of money, no matter how willing you may be to give it. But there is a form of keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope; the guides are allowed to sell photographs of the various objects of interest, and sometimes they pester you with them to an extent far worse than any direct application for gratuities.

The traveler should be cautious about making a "half-bargain" with guides, valets, et id omne genus, who will be sure to make all kinds of claim against him. Never accept the services of one of these men without a positive agreement as to the amount he is to receive, and if you can have it include his pour boire, so much the better. He always desires to leave something open for a demand, while you should be equally certain to have no loop-hole in the contract. A Neapolitan guide will fix his services at five francs a day, "and something for myself if you are satisfied." Now this something breeds a great deal of trouble. The writer had one of these fellows to accompany him up Vesuvius on his first visit to Naples. The 'something' was left undetermined; the guide received five francs at the end of the day with a franc extra, which was thought to be quite sufficient. He struck an attitude of astonishment and declared himself outrageously treated; "gentlemen always gives me five francs extra," he remarked, "and some of them gives ten." This was said with an air of withering contempt, but there was nothing in his neighborhood that withered immediately. When a guide proposes to hire himself for five francs and something if you are satisfied, endeavor to fix the amount of the "satisfaction." If he will not do it he is a good subject to drop, unless he is the only one of his kind attainable, and you happen to be in a hurry. Remember always that a half-bargain is a bad bargain, everywhere, and especially in the countries where the fee system is in vogue.

Sometimes even a careful bargain will not protect the traveler from trouble. Italian boatmen will agree for a certain sum, and while on the way they demand more. If you are going on board a steamer at Naples they are apt to be extortionate, as they know you are leaving port and are not likely to give them trouble with the police. A boatman agrees to carry you and your baggage for two francs; you enter his boat and off you go. Half way to the ship he stops rowing and demands four, or perhaps five, francs, and threatens to return to shore unless you comply. If you are strong, and carry a cane or good umbrella, a threat to break his head, accompanied with a gesture to that effect, will generally cause him to proceed. If you are weak and timid, the best way is to say nothing, and if you are tough in conscience and don't mind meeting downright rascality with a white lie, you can nod assent and let him go on. Before he gets to the ship he will increase his demand, and you may nod again. When you reach the vessel do not show your money till your baggage is safe on board, the heavy trunks in the hold, and the lighter things in your cabin. Then pay the sum you first agreed to give, and not a centime more, and, having discharged the obligation, descend to the saloon. The boatman is not allowed to follow you there, but he will give vent to a volley of imprecations that fall harmless on your devoted head if you happen to be ignorant of Italian. When these fellows get too noisy they are ordered away from the ship, and after their departure you may mount again to the deck and enjoy the wonderfully beautiful panorama of the bay of Naples.

The boatmen of Alexandria, Egypt, are worse than their Neapolitan brethren, as they sometimes resort to downright violence. A strong cane is the best argument for them, and if you are two or three men against an equal or inferior number, you have a moral force that stands in good stead. One man alone may face two or three of these rascals, but he is not altogether safe, as they would have little hesitation in robbing him and then throwing him overboard, if they could be sure of escaping undetected. They have been known to pull around the harbor for an hour or two to compel their victim to come to terms, and if brought before the police for their misconduct they generally manage to bribe themselves out of trouble, unless their prosecutor is able and willing to pay more for their punishment than they can for their liberty.

The inhabitants of Switzerland have been noted in all ages for their thrifty habits and their ability to make much of an opportunity. In former times their genius was displayed in watch-making and other industries; in these latter days, they have devoted themselves in great measure to fleecing the tourists that come among them, and some of their performances in this line border on the wonderful. Watch-making and wood-carving still exist, and quite probably there are yet many honest people in the land of the Alps. Down to a recent period the exploitation of the stranger was left to the hotel-keepers, guides, porters, and others with whom he came in contact, and if he felt aggrieved and brought complaint against his swindlers he could receive redress at the hands of the law. On a changÉ tout cela, the government has come to the assistance of the exploiting class, and what was before optional is now official. At every step the tourist encounters a "tariff," and if he objects to anything his attention is called to the fact that it is "official." The hotel porter takes your trunk to the door of the establishment where you have been lodged, and hands it over to a licensed porter, who carries it to the boat, train, or diligence. He stops at the dock, or at the front of the station, where another licensed porter comes forward and bears the trunk to the baggageman; each of the porters must be paid, and the baggageman also expects something, and if you object you are shown the official tariff, from which there is no appeal.

The official tariff is made the scapegoat of a great many extortions and downright falsehoods; the writer will give a bit of his personal experience to illustrate this statement. He was in Martigny, on his way to Chamouny, in the summer of 1880, and wished to hire a carriage for the journey; he had been told that one could be had for thirty or forty francs, and asked the proprietor of the hotel Clerc where carriages were to be had and the price to be paid. The latter answered that the tariff for a carriage for two persons was fifty francs, and there was no other price.

"But," said the stranger, "I have been told that a carriage can be had for thirty or forty francs. Is it not so?"

"Not at all," was the proprietor's answer; "there is only one price, fifty francs. They will tell you so at the office of the Association of Drivers." (Societe des cochers de Martigny.)

He indicated the office, which was close to the hotel, and the stranger went there. The agent assured him that no carriage could be had under fifty francs, and he pointed to the official tariff, by which all drivers were bound. Convinced of the truthfulness of the landlord's statement, the stranger engaged a carriage and paid twenty-five francs in advance, the balance being due on arrival at Chamouny. Then he strolled up the street and came upon an office bearing the announcement:—

Full of wrath at having been swindled, he returned to the hotel and interviewed the landlord. There was a good deal of frankness to the square foot of the conversation, and the landlord became very indignant when told that he had dealt sparingly with the truth. He defended his action on the ground that the official tariff was fifty francs, and he did not recognize the existence of the opposition. In whatever light the case was presented, he responded that the opposition was not "recognized," and he would not allow his patrons to travel by it if possible to prevent their doing so. He denied receiving any commission from the "official" drivers, and waxed wroth at the intimation of such a thing, but the writer ascertained afterwards to his full satisfaction that the drivers gave ten per cent. of their revenues to the hotel-keepers on condition that the latter would ignore the existence of the opposition, and give all patronage to the association.

Cases like the foregoing may be found all over Switzerland in one form or another. Great stress is laid upon the words "official" and "tariff," and matters are so arranged that the traveler can be bled as much as possible with the least possible chance of redress. The authorities connive at the frauds, and the chances are twenty to one that a tourist who has the temerity to bring his disputes before them will be required to pay the sum in question, with a heavy addition in the shape of a fine. As an instance of official connivance, the following may be cited:—

Tourists going from Zermatt to the railway station at Visp have a journey of about eight hours, partly by saddle and partly by wagon; it is customary to forward trunks and valises by the government post, which is due at Visp at 4 P.M., while the train for Lausanne and Geneva leaves at five o'clock. The traveler times his movements so as to get to Visp to claim his baggage and take it to the railway station in season for the train, but he finds on arrival that the postmaster is busy with the verification of the lists, copying them, sorting letters, and arranging parcels in general, so that there is no delivery till after the departure of the train. This neat arrangement compels the traveler who wishes to keep with his luggage to spend a night at Visp, to the profit of one of the two hotels that adorn this uninteresting place, and, furthermore, they have a habit of closing the office half an hour before the departure of the forenoon train, and the hotel-keepers manage to keep you at breakfast until this half-hour has been reached. In this case you must wait till afternoon, or go on without your property, either of which is unpleasant, and if you venture to complain you are told that such is the regulation of the office, and as the postmaster represents the government the futility of any opposition is at once apparent.

The Swiss excel even the Chinese in their genius for combinations and guilds; and the object of these enterprises is not, like those of the Chinese, altogether in the interest of legitimate labor, but to the end that the pocket of the stranger can be depleted to the advantage of the inhabitants of the land of William Tell. Items that were formerly regarded as gratuities, and therefore optional, are now obligatory, and they are frequently demanded with an insolence that rouses the traveler's ire. There are doubtless many honest people in Switzerland, but it is not easy for the ordinary traveler to find them, and the difficulty seems to be increasing every year.