The jutka was such torture and indignity that we walked the last block to the hotel in a great garden, where a hen-brained lot of "don't-know" servants held the summer-house, which served as hotel office.
There were no manager, no rooms, no memorandum of our telegrams, no anything at this only hotel. There was no other place to go; no steamer leaving for five days. The butler led us to a neglected row of rooms that we might prepare for tiffin and await the return of the manager. Ants ran riot over the beds and the torn matting on the dirty cement floor; the ragged, brown mosquito-netting suggested horrors in the darkness; and the bath-water of days ago stood iridescent in the tubs. We retreated to the stone porch and then to the dining-room, where there was painted as a decorative frieze: "Recommend us. Recommend us. The best hotel in India." There was a veteran table cloth, but a charming floral decoration, and we were served a pallid and tasteless soup, potato croquettes, grilled bones, and "cornflower cream," i. e., a watery blanc-mange. Meanwhile, our robust British table neighbors—all resident Anglo-Indians, with a proper scorn for tourists—ate broiled birds, dressed the most inviting tomato-salads, and closed their feast with red bananas and cheese. "Oh! that belongs gentlemans. Gentlemans self buy bazaar," hissed the butler, when we had sternly pointed to and ordered birds and salad and bananas.
Then the manager came and bowed us into a carriage and off to a branch house, "a residential hotel," where he said he had most spacious rooms
