A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things

by Max O'Rell

When you go to America, bring with you a dozen shirts. No more. When these are soiled, buy a new dozen, and so on. You will thus get a supply of linen for many years to come, and save your washing bills in America, where the price of a shirt is much the same as the cost of washing it.

.......

January 10.

I was glad to see Bill Nye again. He turned up at the Everett House this morning. I like to gaze at his clean-shaven face, that is seldom broken by a smile, and to hear his long, melancholy drawl. His lank form, and his polished dome of thought, as he delights in calling his joke box, help to make him so droll on the platform. When his audience begins to scream with laughter, he stops, looks at them in astonishment; the corners of his mouth drop and an expression of sadness comes over his face. The effect is irresistible. They shriek for mercy. But they don’t get it. He is accompanied by his own manager, who starts with him for the north to-night. This manager has no sinecure. I don’t think Bill Nye has ever been found in a depot ready to catch a train. So the manager takes him to the station, puts him in the right car, gets him out of his sleeping berth, takes him to the hotel, sees that he is behind the platform a few minutes before the time announced for the beginning of the lecture, and generally looks after his comfort. Bill is due in Ohio to-morrow night, and leaves New York to-night by the Grand Central Depot.

“Are you sure it’s by the Grand Central?” he said to me.

“Why, of course, corner of Forty-second Street, a five or ten minutes’ ride from here.”

You should have seen the expression on his face, as he drawled away:

“How—shall—I—get—there, I—wonder?”

.......

This afternoon I paid a most interesting visit to several girls’ schools. The pupils were ordered by the head-mistress, in each case, to gather in the large room. There they arrived, two by two, to the sound of a march played on the piano by one of the under-mistresses. When they had all reached their respective places, two chords were struck on the instrument, and they all sat down with the precision of the best drilled Prussian regiment. Then some sang, others recited little poems, or epigrams—mostly at the expense of men. When, two years ago, I visited the Normal School for girls in the company of the President of the Education Board and Colonel Elliott F. Shepard, it was the anniversary of George Eliot’s birth. The pupils, one by one, recited a few quotations from her works, choosing all she had written against man.