I embarked on a steamer at Cherbourg, with my mother and some friends, bound for New York. Pierre Mortier came on board to offer his best wishes for a delightful voyage. We made him inspect our state-rooms, my friends and I, and we shut him in one of them. In vain he battered the wooden door with fist and foot. We were deaf to his appeals, for we had decided to release him only when the boat was already out of the roadstead and bound for the shores of the new world. At first he protested, not without vehemence, for he was not at all equipped as regards wardrobe for such a voyage, but he soon cooled off and gaily assumed his part in the rather strenuous farce into which we had precipitated him. “Be quiet,” I said to him, “everything will come out all right.” “But how? I haven’t even a spare collar with me.” His appearance was so disconsolate that I began to laugh heartily. Gaiety spreads from one person to another as easily as gloom. He began, in his turn, to laugh. Arrived in New York we went to the best hotel in Brooklyn. The first thing that caught Pierre Mortier’s eye in the hotel lobby was the unusual number of spittoons. They were everywhere, of all sizes and shapes, for Americans do not hesitate, if they have no receptacle within easy reach, to spit on the floor, and to throw the ends of their cigars anywhere, without even taking the trouble to extinguish them. We reached our rooms. There in an array along the wall some buckets, filled with water, attracted his attention. “Some more spittoons!” cried Mortier. Everybody laughed, and he said in a somewhat peevish tone: “Then what are those buckets for?” “Why, in case of fire.” “I thought,” said Mortier, “that all American buildings were fire-proof.” “That is what you hear in Paris, but houses of that sort are really very rare.” “Yet you pay enough in your country to have more comfort and security than anywhere else. For instance, that carriage just now. It was nothing short of robbery. Twenty-five francs to take us from the station here. And such an old trap! I don’t understand why your laws tolerate such things.” Already he was beginning to protest. There was sure to be something else the next day. On awakening on the first morning he pressed once on the electric button in his bedroom. A bell-boy appeared, bringing a pitcher of ice water. Thinking this a form of cheap wit Mortier sputtered some of his worst insults, happily couched in French. The bell-boy, a huge negro, looked calmly down upon this excited little man with the fair hair and skin, and then, without asking for his tip, quietly closed the door and went away. This attitude of unconcern was not calculated to assuage our friend’s bellicose mood. He rang the bell again, and three times instead of once. That was the summons to be made when a guest wanted a boot-black sent to take his boots. Such a personage presented himself.