There are only a very few hotels where the traveler is received on the American system, and pays a lump sum per day for everything. The engagement is nearly always for the room alone, and all meals are charged extra, and may be taken wherever the customer chooses. There is an extra item for "attendance," and custom has fixed this at one shilling and sixpence at the majority of the English hotels. Some hotels compel you to breakfast in the house, or at all events they charge you for that meal, whether you take it or not, but the dinner is quite optional with you. The dining-room is generally known as the "coffee-room," but in some hotels there is a larger hall in addition to the coffee-room, where the table d'hote dinner is served. One can breakfast very comfortably in the coffee-room, as he will find the morning papers there, and frequently a stock of guide-books and writing materials, with which he may amuse himself while his chop or steak is being prepared. Chops, steaks, ham and eggs, and cold meats are the principal items of an English breakfast, and there is hardly any variation from day to day.
If the dinner is served in the continental style, the traveler has no choice, but takes the courses in the order in which they are brought. A dinner "off the joint" is another thing, and a peculiarly British institution. Soup is served, and then fish, and then comes the joint, which is the _piece de resistance_ of the day. A huge round of beef, smoking hot from the fire, or perhaps an equally huge piece of mutton, is mounted on a small table whose legs terminate in casters; by means of this table the joint is wheeled before each customer, who indicates to the carver the exact morsel he desires. There can be no deception, and no opportunity to serve up slices that have been warmed over from a previously cooked joint. The form of service is quite a novelty to the newly-arrived American, and various opinions have been passed upon its advantages. Some are loud in its praise while others declare that the sight of the steaming joints destroys their appetite.
The dinner costs from two shillings, sixpence, to five shillings, and there is an extra charge of threepence or sixpence for attendance, if the customer is not stopping in the hotel, and sometimes when he is. This attendance business is a nuisance, and many a stranger has spoken his mind freely in denouncing it as a well-regulated swindle. The theory is that it pays for the service, but it does nothing of the kind, and every waiter who has done the least thing for you, as well as others who have not lifted a finger in your aid, expects to receive a fee before your departure. Some of the hotels have the impertinence to print on their bill-heads "the service is all included, and nothing more is expected," a falsehood as glaring as any that has ever been told in the history of the world. The stranger who takes them at their word, and leaves the house without distributing sixpences and shillings to the servants, would be looked upon as little less than a downright swindler, and be received with coldness and negligence if he had the temerity to venture there again.