in a careless way if they publish any pamphlet on "How to Do a Desert
Tour."

_Later_: Have been to Cook. No pamphlet, but a friend in need. Talk of
casting bread on the waters! In Rome I cast a crust which I didn't
want, and it's come back in Cairo with butter and sugar on it.

Must have been two years ago in Rome when a young chap wrote to me to
the Embassy. Said he'd been disappointed in getting work he'd come
abroad for, had seen my name, recognized it, was from my county; and
could I use him as a stenographer or anything? I couldn't; but I found
him some one who could; and forgot him till I saw him this morning a
fully fledged clerk at Cook's. Checking the impulse to fall on his
neatly striped blue and white bosom, I invited him to lunch; and as a
reward for what he calls "past and present favours," he had given me
new life. What I mean to say is, he's promised to provide me not only
with tents, but camels and camel-boys and a camp chef, and waiters and
washbowls and a desert dragoman, and thousands of things I'd never
thought of. It seems practically certain that since Napoleon no such
genius has been born as Slaney. Cleopatra would say that S. is the
reincarnation of Napoleon; but neither Cleopatra nor any one else
--above all, Sir Marcus Lark--is to know of his existence. Such is the
disinterested self-sacrifice of this buttered-and-sugared Crust, that
it will do everything for me, while keeping itself and the Organization
which controls it, completely in the background. The Organization is
too great to mind; and the Crust, alias T. Slaney, thinks itself too
small.

Lark, Ltd., considers himself a budding rival of the firm of Cook; but
a deadly bud. If, however, Sir M. should come to hear that I had flown