An excerpt from the beginning: "As I walked to Geisenheimer's that night I was feeling blue and restless, tired of New -York, tired of dancing, tired of everything. Broadway was full of people hurrying to the theatres. Cars rattled by. "All the electric lights in the world were blazing down on the Great White Way. And it all seemed stale and dreary to me. Geisenheimer's was full as usual. All the tables were occupied, and there were several couples already on the dancing-floor in the centre. "The band was playing 'Michigan': I want to go back, I want to go backTo the place where I was born.Far away from harmWith a milk-pail on my arm. I suppose the fellow who wrote that would have called for the police if anyone had ever really tried to get him on to a farm, but he has certainly put something into the tune which makes you think he meant what he said. It's a homesick tune, that. "I was just looking round for an empty table, when a man jumped up and came towards me, registering joy as if I had been his long-lost sister. He was from the country. I could see that. It was written all over him, from his face to his shoes. He came up with his hand out, beaming. "'Why, Miss Roxborough!' 'Why not?' I said. "'Don't you remember me?' "I didn't. "'My name is Ferris.' "'It's a nice name, but it means nothing in my young life.' "'I was introduced to you last time I came here. We danced together.' "This seemed to bear the stamp of truth. If he was introduced to me, he probably danced with me. It's what I'm at Geisenheimer's for. "'When was it?' "'A year ago last April.'"
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
