Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/368

Rh Maybe, on the appearance of this, Reuter's Cairo Agent may not be averse to telling me on what or whose authority he made this charge in my own hearing. The incident for the moment is closed, but if it is reopened, it must be re-opened somewhere where highly placed officials may not be successfully appealed to to go around asking lawyers not to take up my case. Memo. for that News-Agency representative — "Walls have ears," and "Don't shout till you are out of the wood."

I trust that when I send up my card to the London correspondent of the newspaper from whose article I have quoted, he will, instead of imitating his brother knight of the pen in Cairo, at least receive me, and examine the originals of the documents inserted in my narrative, disproving the charges which he was the medium of circulating in England and on the Continent. Then, if satisfied with their genuineness in the first place, and in the second place convinced that during my long captivity I was striving more than any other captive to effect my escape, he will at least, when next writing to his readers, try to do what little he can towards repairing the great injury which he did me in England, though it was without malice, I admit, and then try to have his error corrected in the German papers. I ask nothing more than this. Is it too much to ask?

But from the sea of slander and uncharitableness in which I was struggling, there rose some kindly hands to help me. When pressed by the War Office to repay the £20 I had borrowed from it on the way down —