There were brilliant panoramas on Calcutta streets, those glittering noondays and golden afternoons, but the hotels had only increased in numbers, and advanced in price in the few years. Hotels in India are all conducted on the pension or American plan of a fixed rate per day, with everything save wine included, and the charges had risen from the average five and seven rupees to ten and fifteen rupees, to the indignation of Anglo-Indians, who, in no gentle terms, blame increasing tourist travel for the increased cost of living.
I was conducted across a back yard and up a flight of outer steps to a room whose reed matting had not been disturbed in many seasons. "But the Bishop of New York occupied that room last year and made no complaint," said the landlady, dramatically.
"Think how much more Christian fortitude and saving grace a bishop has to have"—and she countermanded the order for a new matting to be laid on top of the old one in shiftless Indian fashion, and decreed a cleaning instead. Two inches of dust, that had to be shoveled off, underlay the matting, then the cement floor was washed with disinfectants, and there was one clean room in one Calcutta hotel that night. When the washstand, grimed with the wear of many seasons, had received a coat of white paint,—without a bowl or article being removed,—it was a splendid apartment—for an Indian hotel. I almost hesitated to exchange it for "one of the best rooms in the house"—a lofty, whitewashed cell with worn cocoa matting on the floor, where twilight
