nothing but coffee! Think of Horace,” he continued, “has not he already said: ‘omne tulit, punctum, qui miscuit’ . . . coffee with something else? Do not you act in the same way, when you put sugar and milk in your cup?”
And then I have to be silent. Not because he is right, but because I owe it as a duty to the firm Last & Co. to see that old Stern doesn’t go over to Busselinck & Waterman, who would serve him badly because they are tricksters.
To you, reader, I pour out my heart, and in order that, reading Stern’s scribbling—have you really read it?—you may not pour out your anger on an innocent head—for I ask you, who will engage a broker that calls him a cannibal?—I insist on convincing you of my innocence. For it is plain I cannot push Stern out of the firm of my book, now that things have gone so far that Louisa Rosemeyer, when she comes from Church—the boys seem to wait for her—asks whether he’ll come early in the evening, so that he may read them a lot about Max and Tine.
But as you will have bought or hired the book relying on the respectable title, which promises something solid, I recognize your claim to a good thing for your money, and therefore am now again writing a couple of chapters myself. You don’t belong to the club of the Rosemeyers, reader, and are therefore more fortunate than I, who have to listen to it all. You are at liberty to skip the chapters that smell of German excitability, and to take notice only of what is written by myself, who am a respectable man, and a coffee-broker.
I have been amazed to learn from Stern’s scribblings—and he has shown me from Shawlman’s parcel that it is true—that there are no coffee-plantations in that division of Lebak. This is very wrong, and I shall consider my trouble amply rewarded if my book succeeds in drawing the Government’s attention to such an omission. It is supposed to be shown in those papers of Shawlman’s that the soil in those parts is not suitable to coffee-growing. But this is in no way an excuse, and I maintain that they are guilty of
