Chestnut-Burr XI — William Nye Visits Royalty From the Home of the Ham Sandwich
Queen Kapiolani Receives the Distinguished Littérateur in State—A Robust, Healthful Queen—Sandwich Business and Court Matters—The Swallow-tail Coat in the Sandwich Islands.
The sun was just slipping out the back door of the West and hunting for the timber of New Jersey as Queen Kapiolani, at her rooms in the Victoria Hotel, received a plain, rectangular card, printed in two kinds of ink at the owner’s steam job office, containing the following brief but logical statement:
Wilhelm Von Nyj,
Littérateur and Danseuse.
On the back of the card the Von Nyj arms had been emblazoned with a rubber stamp. Down-stairs, near the dais of the night clerk, stood a gayly caparisoned yet cultivated cuss, pouring over a late volume of the city directory. He was the author of these lines.
Scarcely an hour had elapsed when a tinted octavo page who waits on the Queen, slid down the stair-rail and told me that her royal Highness would receive me in state as soon as she could change her dress.
Later on I was ushered into the presence of Queen Kapiolani, who was at the time accompanied by her suite and another gentleman whose name I did not learn.