“I think,” said my companion, after ten minutes’ application, “that the man who sent you this letter writes Italian about as badly as we read it.  I think I could decipher the meaning of his words if I knew what letters those funny scratches were intended to represent.  But let us stick to it.  After a while we may get a little used to the writing, and I must admit that I have a curiosity to know what the man has to say about his bear.”

After a time the work became easier.  Miss Edith possessed an acuteness of perception which enabled her to decipher almost illegible words by comparing them with others which were better written.  We were at last enabled to translate the letter.  The substance of it was as follows: 

The writer came to New York on a ship.  There was a man on the ship, an Italian man, who was very wicked.  He did very wicked things to the writer.  When he got to New York he kept on being wicked.  He was so wicked that the writer made up his mind to kill him.  He waited for him one night for two hours.

[Illustration:  Deciphering the Dago’s letters]

At last the moment came.  It was very dark, and the victim came, walking fast.  The avenger sprang from a door-way and plunged his knife into the back of the victim.  The man fell, and the moment he fell the writer of the letter knew that he was not the man he had intended to kill.  The wicked man would not have been killed so easily.  He turned over the man.  He was dead.  His eyes were used to the darkness, and he could see that he was the wrong man.

The coat of the murdered man had fallen open, and a paper showed itself in an inside pocket.  The Italian waited only long enough to snatch this paper.  He wanted to have something which had belonged to that poor, wrongly murdered man.  After that he heard no more about the great mistake he had committed.  He could not read the newspapers, and he asked nobody any questions.  He put the paper away and kept it.  He often thought he ought to burn the paper, but he did not do it.  He was afraid.  The paper had a name on it, and he was sure it was the name of the man he had killed.  He thought as long as he kept the paper there was a chance for his forgiveness.

This was all four years ago.  He worked hard, and after a while he bought a bear.  When his bear ate up the India-rubber on my bicycle he was very much frightened, for he was afraid he might be sent to prison.  But that was not the fright that made him run away.

When he talked to the boy and asked him the name of the keeper of the inn, and the boy told him what it was, the earth seemed to open and he saw hell.  The name was the name that was on the paper he had taken from the man he had killed by mistake, and this was his wife whose house he was staying at.  He was seized with such a horror and such a fear that everything might be found out, and that he would be arrested, that he ran away to the railroad and took a train for New York.