“I have no more to tell you. Work as hard as you possibly can, live soberly and most minutely by rule, and so long as any dregs of strength remain to you struggle to retain some small part of the product of your labour for the support of yourselves and your families. The rest will, in the natural course of things, find its way into the hands of men like myself.... And now depart with my benediction. But, stay,” he said, as though a thought had struck him, “I cannot let you go without a little present for each.”
So saying, the kindly old man went to a cupboard of beautiful inlaid work, and drawing from it seven dried figs in the last stages of aridity and emaciation, he presented one to each of his nephews, who received the gift with transports of gratitude and affection.
Just as they were about to take their leave the youngest boy (a child, it will be remembered, of but tender years), approached his uncle with a beautiful mixture of humility and love, and bringing out a paper which he had secreted in the folds of his tunic, begged the merchant to sign his name in it and date it too, as a souvenir of these delightful mornings.
“With all my heart, my little fellow,” said Mahmoud, patting him upon the head and reflecting that such good deeds cost nothing and are their own regard.
Next morning, on Mahmoud sending a slave to his cashier for the sum required to pay a band of Kurdish Torturers whom he desired to hire for his debtors’ prison, he was annoyed to receive the reply that there was no cash immediately available, a large draft signed by him having been presented that very morning and duly honoured. As the sum was considerable, and as the payment had been made but a few moments before, the cashier begged his master to wait for half an hour or so until more metal could be procured from a neighbouring deposit.
It was in vain that Mahmoud searched his memory for the signature of any such instrument. He was puzzled and suspected a forgery. At last he determined that the paper should be sent for and put before him. There, sure enough was his signature; but the sum of 20,000 dinars therein mentioned was in another and most childish hand. Then did it suddenly break upon the great Captain of Industry that the tiny child, his youngest nephew, who had asked for his autograph as a souvenir, was not wholly unworthy of the blood which he had collaterally inherited.... He wrote to the boy’s father and secured the little fellow’s services as office-boy at nothing-a-week. He watched his developing talent, and was not disappointed. Long before the lad was full grown he had got every clerk of the great business house into his debt and had successfully transferred to his own secret hiding-place the savings of the porter, the carrier and the aged widow who cleaned the place of a morning. By his seventeenth year he had brought off a deal in fugitive slaves, taking equal amounts from the culprits for hiding and from the masters for betraying them. By his eighteenth he had control of a public bath where clients were watched by spies and thus furnished a source of ample revenue. Before he was of age he had astonished and delighted his now more than octogenarian uncle by selling him, under a false name and through a man of straw, a ship due to arrive at Bosra, but, as a fact, sunk off Bushire five days before.