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The waiters, too, both white and black, must have vastly improved. The white waiter in America, as I found him, is quite the smartest, most intelligent, and, in his own manly way, the most polite of his class—a class very well typified by the bugler of the St. Louis. His coloured confrère does his work deftly, silently, and well.

Kipling relates a conversation which took place in the Palace Hotel between a coloured waiter and himself, in which George—every servant in America whose name you don’t know is George—made the remark:

“Oh ——! Wages like that wouldn’t keep me in cigars!”

I stayed at the Palace in San Francisco, and from what I heard and saw I should say that a waiter who made a remark like that nowadays would very soon find that cigars were an unattainable luxury to a man out of work. He would be “fired” on the spot.

My own experience certainly is that the Americans are the politest people on earth, or, perhaps I ought to say, the most courteous, because any one can be polite if it pays him. Only a gentleman can be courteous. They have learnt, apparently at the hands of Mother Nature herself, that subtle blending of politeness and dignity which we call courtesy.