"But you did ask about the foreign letters, didn't you, Jack?"

"Yes, I worked that part of it pretty well, and managed to get into a
talk about the great difficulty which most foreigners here in this
country found in communicating with their old folks abroad. Mr.
Dickerson said there was a time when every day he had quite a batch of
letters going out to different countries; because you know there are
many foreign workers in our mills here, and they were constantly
sending money home to their poor folks. But as the war went on, he
said, they began to write less and less, because they feared the
letters were being held up by the British, or the vessels being sunk
with all the mail aboard by the German subs. So he said it was a rare
event nowadays for him to cancel the stamps on a foreign letter,
though he had one yesterday, he remembered."

"Yesterday, Jack? Oh! what do you mean?"

"But it was to Italy the letter was going," Jack hastened to explain.
"Mr. Dickerson said he took particular pains to notice it, because the
stamp was put on the wrong end of the envelope. He remembered that
Luigi, the bootblack at the railroad station, always insisted on doing
this. He also read the address, which was to Luigi's parents in
Genoa."

Big Bob's face darkened again.

"Too bad!" he muttered, disconsolately; "why couldn't that letter he
chanced to notice have been my lost one? Hard luck, I must say, all
around."