Swahill

We've just heard of a thing that happened to an anthropologist connected with Harvard who got back some months ago from two years in East Africa. He was going through the Grand Central here, his mind still full of scientific data, including skull measurements and the shape of crania, when he caught sight of a Redcap who seemed unmistakably to have the Semitic cast of features of the Swahili Africans. He went up to the darky and began jabbering away in Swahili, and in a couple of seconds the Redcap was down bumping his head on the floor and thrashing his arms about. It took the anthropologist two or three minutes to stop the tantrum, which he did by switching to English. It came out that the Harvard man had been in the Redcap's home town; knew some of his cousins.

The Redcap's name is now George Gabriel, and he got here because he happened to be a porter for Theodore Roosevelt on his hunting trip of 1909-10. Roosevelt brought him home when he came. He has recently become a Pullman porter, running to Buffalo. If you're on a train bound there, you'd better find out if your porter's name is George before you say anything in Swahili. --The New Yorker.