“Read them according to the dates,” said the youth, “and see if my English hasn’t improved. I copied them all and sent out the copies. All but two sent me money. One wrote me to come and see him to-day. The other I haven’t heard from. You don’t spell ‘poverty’ with a capital, do you?”
As he had spoken but one sentence in English since our meeting, I was surprised to note the fluent use of that language in his letters. None of them contained actual errors; and only a peculiar turning of a phrase, here and there, which a reader off his guard might easily have overlooked, betrayed the nationality of the writer. The stories they told were proof of an inventive imagination. A dozen “hard-luck tales,” no one of which resembled the others, were all signed by different Americanized names, over different addresses. Here a youth from Baltimore, who had come to Egypt to open a store, had been robbed of all he possessed. There a civil engineer from New York had been forced to leave his work on the Berber-Suakim line and hasten down to Cairo to attend a sick wife and four small children. An aged stone mason, who had been injured while working on the barrage at Assuan, prayed for assistance to get back to his home in Cincinnati. A California prospector, just returned from an unsuccessful expedition into the Uganda protectorate, was lying ill and penniless in a miserable lodging-house.
Nor did the resourceful German confine himself to his own sex. The last letter was an appeal to a well-known American lady from a young girl who had come from Boston to act as stenographer to a tourist firm that had not materialized, and who sought assistance before starvation should drive her to ruin.
“How about this Boston story?” I asked.
“Best of the lot,” replied the youth. “Sent me two pounds and a letter full of wise advice—for females.”
“But didn’t she ask to see you?”
“Bah! Most of them are too busy enjoying themselves. They prefer to send a bank note and forget the matter. Once in a while, one of them sends for me and, if I think he is not too clever—most millionaires aren’t, you know—I go to see him, and generally get something on the Pennsylvania Dutch story.”
“Where do you get the names?”
“Mostly from this,” said the youth, reaching into the box once more and pulling out a Paris edition of the New York Herald. “If a millionaire starts for Egypt, or lands here, or catches cold, or bruises his toe, the Herald knows it—and never forgets the address. Then there is a society paper published here in Cairo—”
“Do you write German letters, too?”