Advance Australasia Author:Frank Thomas Bullen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill A LAND OF DELIGHT HOTEL life, which for some people has a curious fascination, is to me a hateful necessity of travel, and few indeed are the hotels wh... more »ich I have sampled in my journeyings about the world where I have been able to feel even moderately comfortable, much less at home from home. The comfort of the old English inn, so fondly dwelt upon by Dickens, is a thing of the past, and the huge caravanserais of England, America, or the Continent, are places which to me are a positive nightmare. The extortion on every hand, the absolute lack of plain, homely cooked food which one can make a meal of, the almost unbearable and entirely uncomfortable magnificence on every side combine to make hotel life to me, and many others like-minded, a thing to be dreaded. Therefore I feel to-day that I am among thefavoured ones of mankind in that I have " struck" a hotel which is my ideal of what a hotel should be. The attendants are delightfully civil without a trace of servility, the food is not merely as good as any that I have ever eaten but it is plainly, carefully dressed, and not smothered with vile concoctions of sauce to disguise its natural savours (in most places this is done as a sort of compensation for the lack of savour in the fish, flesh, or fowl dealt with), there are six or seven different kinds of vegetables, beautifully fresh and homelike, and cooked as if they were worth attention, with luncheon and dinner, there is abundance of most delicious fruit, baths are free and available all day, and the inclusive rate is ten shillings per day or three guineas a week. Also there are no niggling paltry extras for attendance, even the matutinal cup of tea and newspaper at 7 a.m., and the cup of afternoon tea being supplied free. I begin to wonder first whether there was ever...« less