Commercial travelers of the tropics have
a saying: "There are worse hotels in the world than the Kast--but
why take the trouble?" And, year upon year, they return there for
reasons connected with the other hostelries of Caracuna, which I
forbear to specify.
To Miss Polly Brewster, the Kast was a place of romance. Five
miles away, as the buzzard flies, she could have dined well, even
elegantly, on the Brewster yacht. Would she have done it? Not for
worlds! Miss Brewster was entranced by the courtly manners of her
waiter, who had lost one ear and no small part of the countenance
adjacent thereto, only too obviously through the agency of some
edged instrument not wielded in the arts of peace. She was further
delightedly intrigued by the abrupt appearance of a romantic-hued
gentleman, who thrust out over the void from the second balcony an
anguished face, one side of which was profusely lathered, and
addressed to all the hierarchy of heaven above, and the peoples of
the earth beneath, a passionate protest upon the subject of a
cherished and vanished shaving brush; what time, below, the head
waiter was hastily removing from sight, though not from memory, a
soup tureen whose agitated surface bore a creamy froth not of a
lacteal origin.
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