WHAT AN OLD MAN DID FOR EGYPT.

Waikato Times, Volume 100, Issue 16712, 30 January 1926, Page 14 (Supplement)

WHAT AN OLD MAN DID FOR EGYPT.

A GREEK m HIS LITTLE GARDENHARVEST OF FIFTEEN SEEDS. One of Egypt's greatest benefactors is living out his old age almost in poverty. He is a Greek named Sakellarides. Long age he settled on a small plot and grew cotton. One day he noticed that three seed vessels hehad gathered had finer and longer fibres than any of the rest. He took the fifteen seeds they contained and sowed them apart, and next year he sowed the seeds these plants yielded, and-,so on till he had fifteen acre of the" best crop. v But by this time his discovery had become known. People bribed his gardeners to give them seeds, and others stole them. The result was that others got rich while he remained poor, and to-day the crops he started are famous all over the world.

Five years ago the Egyptian Government made the old man a grant of £SOOO, which would bring in about £250 a year, and now they have offered him a pension of £360 a year for five years. But this he has refused. If the country he has benefited does not realise what it owes him, he says, he prefers to be independent of its doles.