Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part--quite an unwilling part--in an incident that goes to show some of the difficulties attendant upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly, except for those run by the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are practically none. It is not to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like literature or music, not greatly encouraged in a new country. Take waiters again. Though the wages they make are good and the standard of waiting expected from them is rarely the highest, I believe they are a perennial difficulty to hotel proprietors. On the trains and in the big towns in the East one usually finds that the waiters are Englishmen not long out; and they are so not because they have acquired the science of waiting in the old country (as one might suppose, since it is usually well learnt there), but because they have not as yet acquired that Canadian spirit which makes anything savouring of domestic service--or even of undue courtesy as from man to { 183} man--distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any case, dislikes working for uncertainly long hours. Englishmen, it has to be admitted, are not particularly zealous for long and uncertain hours of work either in these days; and therefore it generally happens that as soon as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he, too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In the East a freshly arrived immigrant takes his place; but in the West there is no such constant supply of spare white men. The result is that Western hotels are more or less driven to employ as waiters either women or Japanese and Chinese boys.
The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of the former. Heaven knows we have women waiters enough in England, but in Canada I do not think heaven can know.... As soon as I came in to breakfast in the morning I became aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eyeglasses and tight lips and stiff white cuffs--very much the type of the Girton girl in the older times--who was clearly in charge of the room, and meant to let every one know it. I shrank down at the nearest table, and in a hushed voice requested and received my breakfast from one of the waitresses who were theoretically in attendance. She was very kindly, { 184} only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I wanted coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but as a man at his breakfast usually prefers his own fancy to other people's, I looked about delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's eye and induce her to change the pot. By bad fortune I merely caught the eye of the sharp young lady who, coming up and learning from my unwilling lips that I had been given the wrong drink, said imperiously: