Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/317

 and among other agreeable guests we met at this agreeable affair was Edwin N. Gunsaulus, American consul. Mr. Gunsaulus of course keeps in touch with American affairs, and he gave us a good deal of news from home. The consul is a cousin of Rev. Frank Gunsaulus, the noted American preacher and lecturer, and comes from a town in Ohio smaller than Atchison. Another fact that endeared him to me is that he formerly ran a weekly newspaper, and was editor, publisher, business manager, reporter, and one of the type-setters I may as well tell here of the reprehensible conduct of an American now a resident of Johannesburg. I refer to Isham F. Atterbury, formerly of St. Joseph, Missouri, but now manager of the African Realty Trust. I expect the American women to be as indignant over his conduct as the American passenger conductors will be over the treatment of the conductor of the train on which we traveled last night. Mr. and Mrs. Atterbury were also guests at the dinner, and the story I shall relate of Mr. Atterbury's conduct I had first-hand from his wife's lips. Mr. Gunsaulus also heard the story, and I called his attention to it particularly by recommending that, as American consul, he do something about it The story is as follows: For years Mrs. Atterbury kept house, and slaved, as American women do, in preparing delicacies for her husband to eat, in order that she might keep him good-natured. But human endeavor has a limit, and Mrs. Atterbury's slaving for her husband's comfort finally resulted in a collapse, and a trip to a sanitarium. After her partial recovery, they went to an English boarding-house, which Mrs. Atterbury declares is worse than an Ameri