The Lightning Conductor Discovers America

								

is most distinguished!
I told you that he looks as an Italian prince ought to look and seldom
does; but he claims American citizenship. He sailed from New York in the
Lusitania, and was among those saved. Far from advertising this
adventure, the hero of it would apparently have kept silence if he
could; but it leaked out somehow in Ireland, Whiffits doesn't quite know
how. In any case, at the time of taking passage on the Arabic back to
America, months later, paragraphs about the man's Lusitania experience
appeared in the papers. He was catechized at the consulate when trying
to get a passport for the United States, and it came out then that there
was no Peter Storm on board the Lusitania. Our Mystery explained,
however, that in the third class there was a passenger registered as
"Peter Sturm." The name, according to him, was spelled wrongly at the
time. Nobody has since contradicted this statement, so it has been given
the benefit of the doubt. Once more the man's luck bobbed up on board
the Arabic, where he was saved again, and behaved well, rescuing a lot
of people. What he did in that way on the Lusitania isn't known; but
the searchlight of fame was turned full upon him after the Arabic, and
has never ceased to play around his head. By the by, the said head was
wounded in the Arabic affair, and bears a scar which runs down over
the left temple and is rather becoming. Also he got pneumonia from
exposure, and lay dangerously ill for some time. Several persons whose
lives he saved wanted to give him money, but he refused to accept. He
was nursed at a hospital in Ireland, and when he grew strong enough he
found work, in order to pay his own way to America. What he is going to
turn his hand to over there he doesn't seem to know, or won't tell.
We have a real live millionairess on the Evangeline an American
millionairess from the West somewhere, a Mrs. Shuster. She's a widow,
about forty-five, common but kind. For "two twos" I believe she would
adopt the Stormy Petrel. She's been in Switzerland, where people used to
go to eat chocolate and see mountains, and where they now go to make
proposals of peace. I believe she made some, but nobody listened much,
so she came away disappointed and fiercely determined to do good
somewhere or know the reason why! She's a stout, wildly untidy woman
whose mouse-coloured hair is always coming down, though it's freely
dotted with irrelevant tortoise-shell combs; and whose elaborate clothes
look somehow insecure, the way scree does on the side of a mountain. Her
ideas leap out of her brain like rabbits out of holes, and then go
scuttling away again, to be followed ineffectively by others: and her
latest is benefiting the Ship's Mystery. She's sure he can't be
American, because Americans don't have eyes like wells of ink, and
short, close black beards like those of English or Italian naval
officers. Her theory is that he's a subject of some belligerent country,