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Show HOTEL CLERKS SUFFER FROM CHRONIC KICKERS. "That was an all-right narrative in last Sunday's Sun-day's Sun about the snags that the hotel manager runs into in the course of a day's work. But the day of the hotel manager is one ong dream of hammock-swinging, houris and jugs beneath the bough, compared with tho diurnal whizz of the average man behind tho desk," said a hotel clerk who is famed over the land for his patience and suavity. "The hotel manager can get away. The man behind the desk can't. When things begin to get a little too swift for the manager, he can point both hands to the zenith and mentally declare everything off, clap on his hat and rush out into the air to cool off. But the man behind the desk has got to stay right there and flght 'em until the end of his watch. "If there's any job that's calculated to cause the man holding it down to long hundreds of times over to be sitting alongside some little old ereek a-flshin, that job's tho hotel clerk's, i "Come up to my flat some day and I'll give you a copy of my little brochure entitled 'Eighteen Thousand Immemorial Kicks of Hotel Guests.' For the next edition I'm going to amplify the treatise and make it 80,000 kicks. I'm taking overdoses of nerve tonic right now for the purpose pur-pose of haul'ng myself together from the effects of a kick that spread all over the house only yesterday. "It all fell on me. The manager saw the impending im-pending simoom, and he passed me the vindictive smile and went out for a drive on the Speedway until he knew it would be all over. It was about tho water. "Every drofl of water used in this house is filtered. Yesterday morning the filtering appar- atus curled up on us and had to he taken apart " for repairs. It just happened that coincidentally with the temporary suspension of business of the filtering layout the water was turned off on us for an hour owing to a break in the pipe caused by a subway hlast. "Well, for ahout an hour after the water was turned on again the fluid was of about the color of a passe blood orange and the consistency of maple syrup and, of course, this iiad to happen, when our filtering plant was being tinkered with in sections by tirod plumbers. "You ought to have heard them pile into me. They came flocking from all over the house, and they all but accused me of maliciously making my f way to the reservoir and hurling a half a ton of ochre or shellac into it. They wouldn't listen to any explanation of any .kind. The manager, as I say, foreseeing the wrath to come, had ducked, and I got it all. One old Englishman yelled at 'e that he was going to write to the "Times" Lunnon "Times," y'knaw about the infamy, and so I've got a flrst-rateeven money chanct of heing held up to odium in the pages of the Thunderer before the gaze of my friends of the American colony in London. "There's an amiable little fiction, universally current, that commercial travellers are a joly, happy-go-lucky lot, and as easy to get on with as shaking the jelly of a piece of lemon meringue pie wth a fork. There are few dreamier notions than th'3. The drummers have got a kick coming for every hour on the dial, and few of them ever permit a chance to make a kick to get away from them. |