"In Berlin, just at the moment of our departure, the porter, the gold-laced and brass-buttoned dignitary who browbeats lamblike guests at European hotel entrances, handed us our laundry bill, every article of which was charged double to treble New York prices. In Vienna, tired of blood-letting to each mosquito separately in the group of servants always assembled about the door upon our departure--'the review' they themselves call this evolution--I drew the manager aside and said: 'I understand that there is a way of giving tips to all hands through the management.' (One bleeding as it were.) 'How much extra shall I give you?' He replied: 'Twenty per cent. of your bill.'
"I was rather tickled than bitten the first time I got a nip in a European railway train. One of our party suggested that as the second-class places were crowded we should go into a first-class compartment and await results. When the conductor, in his jim-dandy uniform, came along, he was handed our second-class tickets and a mark--a silver coin worth a paltry twenty-five cents. And he took our tickets and passed on without seeing for what class they called. The vast possibilities of cheaply purchased privileges on future trips acted as a palliative to this little sting. And the thought of what might happen if the traveler in America should try to overcome the virtue of one of our express-train conductors with a 'quarter' brought all our party to see the circumstance from a humorous point of view. Truth to relate, it marked the beginning of a custom we followed--since we learned that it was general--of buying our way past any obstacle that appeared to interrupt the smoothness or comfort of our daily progress. With a little silver we henceforth obtained concessions from grand-looking policemen, soldiers on guard, vergers in churches, museum custodians. It is a common custom for conductors on street cars in Continental Europe to hold out their hands to receive as a tip any small change due, but first handed over to the passenger. You may have your choice in European travel: Bribe and be otherwise happy and free, or virtuously decline to bribe and be snubbed, ordered about and forbidden to see things.