arrive on market days driving in a peasant's cart, and would set up an
office in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were three of them,
of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth
collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government
officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room,
so that the common people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning telegraph
machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The
fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would
crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to
be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no
military service to do.

"But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself
had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in
uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on
his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he
being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid
of the great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be
taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it
cost a lot of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had
three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where
true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father's house was
getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children.
He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His
father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies of his own
raising, and a cleared plot of fair pasture land on the sunny slope of
a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.

"He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the