“If you please,” he said, “you should be so good as to make out the note and then I should sign it.”
“What’s the idea?” inquired the bank manager, puzzled.
“Vell, you see,” he confessed, “I haf to tell you somethings: Myself, I cannot read and write. My vife, she has taught me how to make my own name on paper, but otherwise, with me, reading and writing is nix.”
In amazement the banker stared at him.
“Well, well, well!” he murmured admiringly. “And yet, handicapped as you’ve been, inside of a few years you have become a rich man! I wonder what you’d have been by now if only you had been able to read and write?”
“A shammos,” said Mr. Rabin modestly.
§ 277 Scarcely a Lucrative Calling
A group of wealthy Southerners, Virginians and Carolinians mostly, were on a train returning from a meeting of the National Fox-Hunting Association. Naturally the talk dealt largely with the sport of which they were devotees. A lank Vermonter, who apparently had never done much traveling, was an interested auditor of the conversation.
Presently, when the company in the smoking-compartment had thinned out, he turned to one of the party who had stayed on. He wanted to know how many horses the Southerner kept for fox-hunting purposes and how large a pack of hounds he maintained and about how many foxes on an average he killed in the course of a season.
The Southerner told him. In silence for a minute or two the Vermonter mulled the disclosures over in his mind.