Page:Tales of Today.djvu/81

Rh first object to present itself to my view was the woolly pate of Adolfo Francesco Pergialla, a sort of Abyssinian land-shark in whose service I then was, while flattering myself with the delusion that I had a negro servant. The whites of his eyes rolled and glistened in his black face, his broad, flat nose was dilated to an enormous size, his thick lips, expanded in a smile as broad as a barn-door, disclosed a row of teeth as white as a Newfoundland dog's; he was bursting in his black skin with the desire to speak, and making all sorts of grimaces to attract my attention.

"Well, Francesco, what is it? How much the wiser would I be if you should keep on rolling those crockery eyes of yours for an hour, like that bronze darky with a clock in his stomach? A truce to pantomime, and try to tell me, in the best gibberish you are master of, what the matter is and who is the person who is come to start me from the covert of my idleness."

It is incumbent on me to inform you that Adolfo Francesco Pergialla Abdallah-ben-Mohammed; Abyssinian by birth, formerly a Mohammedan, but now a Christian for the time being, knew every language and could not speak one intelligibly; he would commence in French, continue in Italian and wind up with Turkish or Arabic, and this was more notably the case when the conversation took an embarassingembarrassing [sic] turn for him, as when some bottles of Bordeaux wine or of liqueurs of the isles, or other good things, had mysteriously disappeared before their allotted time. Luckily for me I have some polyglot friends: we would first drive him out of Europe; after he had exhausted his stock of Spanish, Italian and German