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“Tufik,” said Tish sternly, “I want you to tell us everything this minute, and get it over.”

“She ees so little!” he said wistfully. “And the body of my parent–could I let it lie and rot in the so hot sun? Ah, no; Miss Tish, Miss Liz, Miss Ag,–not so. To-day I take back my ticket, get the money, and send it to my sister. She will bury my parent, and then–she comes to this so great America, the land of my good friends!”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Aggie sneezed!

IV

I shall pass over the next month, with its unpleasantnesses; over Charlie Sands’s coming one evening with a black tie and, on the strength of having killed a dog with his machine, asking for money to bury it, and bring another one from Syria! I shall not more than mention Hannah, who kept Tish physically comfortable and well fed and mentally wretched, having a teakettle of boiling water always ready if Tufik came to the apartment; I shall say nothing of our success in getting him employment in the foreign department of a bank, and his ending up by washing its windows; or of the position Tish got him as elevator boy in her hospital, where he jammed the car in some way and held up four surgeons and three nurses and a patient on his way to the operating-room–until the patient changed his mind and refused to be operated on.

Aggie had a brilliant idea about the census–that he could make the census reports in the Syrian district. To this end she worked for some time, coaching Tufik for the examination, only to have him fail–fail absolutely and without hope. He was staying in the Syrian quarter at that time, on account of Hannah; and he brought us various tempting offers now and then–a fruit stand that could be bought for a hundred dollars; a restaurant for fifty; a tailor’s shop for twenty-five. But, as he knew nothing of fruits or restaurants or tailoring, we refused to invest. Tish said that we had been a good while getting to it, but that we were being businesslike at last. We gave the boy nine dollars a week and not a penny more; and we refused to buy any more of his silly linens and crocheted laces. We were quite firm with him.

And now I come to the arriving of Tufik’s little sister–not that she was really little. But that comes later.

Tufik had decided at last on what he would be in our so great America. Once or twice, when he was tired or discouraged, Tish had taken him out in her machine, and he had been thrilled–really thrilled. He did not seem able to learn how to crank it–Tish’s car is hard to crank–but he learned how to light the lamps and to spot a policeman two blocks away. Several times, when we were going into the country, Tish took him because it gave her a sense of security to have a man along.

Having come from a country where the general travel is by camel, however, he had not the first idea of machinery. He thought Tish made the engine go by pressing on the clutch with her foot, like a sewing machine, and he regarded her strength with awe. And once, when we were filling a tire from an air bottle and the tube burst and struck him, he declared there was a demon in the air bottle and said a prayer in the middle of the road. About that time Tish learned of a school for chauffeurs, and the three of us decided to divide the expense and send him.

“In three months,” Tish explained, “we can get him a state license and he can drive a taxicab. It will suit him, because he can sit to do it.”

So Tufik went to an automobile school and stood by while some one drew pictures of parts of the engine on a blackboard, and took home lists of words that he translated into Arabic at the library, and learned everything but why and how the engine of an automobile goes. He still thought–at the end of two months–that the driver did it with his foot! But we were ignorant of all that. He would drop round in the evenings, when Hannah was out or in bed, and tell us what “magneto” was in Arabic, and how he would soon be able to care for Tish’s car and would not take a cent for it, doing it at night when the taxicab was resting.