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Chapter II During my first visit to New York I stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which I had been told was the largest and best managed of the monster Hotels of the city. I arrived just in time for dinner. On being shown into the dining saloon I found between two and three hundred people at table. I had lately been staying at Paris at the Grand Hotel du Louvre, where it was thought we were treated rather liberally in having seven plates at dinner including two sweets, & one cream or water ice. The ice was served in infinitesimal morcels, & if you asked for a second morcel, it was represented by an additional frank in your bill. With this experience of a great European Hotel fresh in my mind, a waiter in the dining saloon of the Fifth Avenue Hotel placed in my hand the bill of fare for the dinner then going on. Seeing almost an interminable printed list of comestibles, & not knowing how these things were managed in America, I supposed that this was the list of dishes the Hotel undertook to prepare; & that had I arrived some hours earlier, and then made my selection, that what I might have ordered wd have now been ready. The menu contained turtle soup, venison, turtle steaks, soft shelled crabs, canvas-back duck; in short whatever fish, flesh, fowl, vegetable, & fruit was then in season. But the attendant informed me that the paper he had given me was the bill of fare for that day, & that every thing