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 |298| down—with my old guides in Cairo asking me to redeem the receipts they had for monies lent me while in prison—with the monies kindly sent me from Berlin to give me a “new start in life” impounded—with the hand of every one against me, after calling at one bank and being refused, I went to Mr. Hewett Moxley, an old friend of the Bleichröders, of Berlin, and now the Director of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Cairo. Handing him my file of letters and telegrams, I asked if he thought that they contained sufficient guarantees for my being able eventually to repay the money which I wished him to advance to me. He left me for a few moments, and then returned, and as he went over one letter after the other, my hopes fell, for he remarked that my “guarantees were not of the very highest order,” and that my “credentials were not of a very satisfactory nature.” But I knew a few moments later that these were pithy, maybe sarcastic, remarks upon the letters which he was glancing through, for while engaged upon these running comments, his clerk was counting out £150 in gold for my immediate needs, and opening a credit for a further £250. I thoroughly enjoyed his joke, so different from those I had so far encountered, for his action was the first kindly one which I received in civilization.