Cheyenne Transporter

The American Hotel

The American hotel is both the centre and the nuisance of the town. Around the hotel congregate all the discontented people, those who from various reasons have lost industry for housekeeping and thrift for plain boarding. They are like birds in a cage, always tempting others to come to live and yet always desirous themselves to get back again to some substantial life. At the hotel you not only get all the news, but all the scandal. It becomes the snoozing and boozing place for the young fellows around the town, who there tell their old stories and cultivate the bar-keeper, and I have often observed that the bar-keeper is the favorite guest in the hotel. You can see young millionaires, or expectants that way, leaning on the bars telling their private family life to the bar-keeper. Liquor encourages convivial intercourse, and bar-keeper here is like the bar-maid in England—some one to make love when all other social intercourse frustrated. The bar-keeper wears such nice white apron, such a spotless shirt, has his hair frizzed every morning, is dainty about his shoes, he juggles his crystal glasses so deftly that he would seem to be what the ladies called "such a refined man."

When a man has got a hollow stomach, looks pale and weak from his secret excesses, and has finally not much of anything but a soft address, insinuations and a good suit of clothes, he gets the name of being "so refined." Frank Howe, who appeared around Grant's Administration as the chief beau, made all his impression by his "refinement," whereas his wife had to get a divorce from him for corrupting his own house. I never quite got over the feeling that he was a refined man, because he seemed to be so effeminate that if there was no refinement about him it seemed to me there could be nothing else. He never antagonized. He had a certain polish amounting to inoffensiveness. Under the skin, however, the wreck of human nature burnt like an old line-of-battle ship that is set on fire to avoid the expense of keeping her up.—"Gath" in Cincinnati Enquirer