“You will remember, my lads, how I was left cut off from my dear home and from all companions, in a strange country, and with no more than 1,500 dinars with which to face the world. This sum may seem to you large, but I can assure you that to the operations of commerce” (and here the merchant yawned) “it is but a drop in the ocean; and I had already so far advanced during one brief week in my character of Financier that I gloomily considered how small a sum that 1,500 was wherewith to meet the cunning, the gluttony, and the avarice of this great world. But a brief sleep (which I took under a Baobab tree to save the cost of lodging) refreshed at once my body and my intelligence, and with the next morning I was ready to meet the world.”
Here the merchant coughed slightly, and addressing his nephews said: “You have doubtless been instructed at school upon the nature of the Baobab?”
“We have,” replied his nephews, and they recited in chorus the descriptions which they had been taught by heart from the text-books of their Academy.
“I am pleased,” replied their uncle, smiling, “to discover you thus informed. You will appreciate how ample a roof this singular vegetable affords.
“Well, I proceeded under the morning sun through a pleasantly wooded and rising country, considering by what contrivance of usury or deceit I might next increase my capital, when I saw in the distance the groves and white buildings of an unwalled town, to which (since large places, especially if they are not war-like, furnish the best field for the enterprise of a Captain of Industry) I proceeded; ... and there, by the Mercy of Allah, there befell me as singular an adventure as perhaps ever has fallen to the lot of man.
“I had not taken up my place in the local caravanserai for more than an hour—I had met no likely fool, and my plans for the future were still vague in my head—when an old gentleman of great dignity, followed by an obsequious officer and no less than six Ethiopian slaves, approached me with deep reverence, and profferring me a leathern pouch, of a foreign kind, the like of which I had never seen before, asked me whether I were not the young man who had inadvertently left it upon a prayer-stone at a shrine outside the city.
“I seized the pouch with an eager air, held it up in transports of joy, and kissing it again and again said, ‘Oh! my benefactor! How can I sufficiently thank you! It is my father’s last gift to me and is all my viaticum as well!’ with which I fell to kissing and fondling it again, pressing it to my heart and so discovered it to be filled with coins—as indeed I had suspected it to be.
“Into so active an emotion had I roused myself that my eyes filled with tears, and the good old man himself was greatly affected. ‘I must warn you, young stranger,’ he said paternally, ‘against this thoughtlessness so common in youth! A great loss indeed had it been for you, if we had not had the good fortune to recover your property.’
“You may imagine my confusion, my dear nephews, at finding that I had been guilty of so intolerable a fault. I blushed with confusion; I most heartily thanked the old gentleman, not for his integrity (which it would have been insulting to mention to one of his great wealth) but for the pains he had taken to seek out a careless young man and to prevent his suffering loss.