‘The King of Italy is the enemy of Abyssinia. The King of Italy must die. If an Abyssinian tries to kill him, he will be suspected, and stopped; therefore he must be killed by a European. The Negus has sent me to find a European who will do this for money. I have been in Italy and France, and there they told me that it was best for me to apply to the followers of your religion, which teaches that all kings ought to be killed. Is it not so? Therefore I come here, to the headquarters of your sect. If one of you will accept the task, on that day I pay him in the money of this country one thousand dollars. On the day I hear that King Humbert is dead I pay you four thousand dollars. Divide it how you like; that is nothing to me.’ Improbable as a fairy tale though all this sounded, I could not resist the evidence of my own senses, which showed me the Abyssinian envoy there in the flesh. I knew, of course, that assassination has always been one of the recognised political methods of Asiatic and African States, but this alliance between a half-civilised despot and the extreme revolutionaries of Europe struck me as altogether without precedent in the history of the world. Certainly my own experience, fertile as it naturally had been in surprising incidents, had never brought to light a more singular intrigue than this. My position now became an extremely difficult one. I had practically agreed to accept the commission to assassinate the King of Italy, but it was not that which troubled me. I foresaw that as soon as Menelik’s agent realised that he had been played with by me he would endeavour to find some other and more trustworthy tool. To denounce him to the police of New York would have been perfectly idle; in the first place he could buy the police, and in the second place no American court would punish a ‘political’ conspiracy, unless, indeed, it were against the United States. I contented myself for the moment with formally undertaking the required murder. The Abyssinian arranged to bring the first instalment of the blood money to the watchmaker’s house on the following Saturday night, and we all three parted apparently on the best of terms. The next day I sent off a long telegraphic despatch summarising the whole situation. The proposal I made was that the Italian Government should cable me authority and funds to enable me to have the Abyssinian envoy privately kidnapped, and returned to his own country, _viâ_ Massowah. They had the incredible folly to wire instead to their Minister in Washington, instructing him to demand the arrest and expulsion of Menelik’s agent.