and you want to send him abroad--with a little capital. Well, Greenland
is just the place for him.' The man looked at me, and almost shook his
head in my face."

"'If you'll excuse me, my lady,' he said, 'it won't do. Mr. Churchill
is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with
him. But ... well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you
can't touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people'll think
you've been defiled--those that don't know you. The foreign nations are
all very well, and the grand duchy--and the getting hold of Greenland,
but what touches me is this--My neighbour Slingsby had a little money,
and he gets a prospectus. It looked very well--very well--and he brings
it in to me. I did not have anything to do with it, but Slingsby did.
Well, now there's Slingsby on the rates and his wife a lady born,
almost. I might have been taken in the same way but for--for the grace
of God, I'm minded to say. Well, Slingsby's a good man, and used to be a
hard-working man--all his life, and now it turns out that that
prospectus came about by the man de Mersch's manoeuvres--"wild-cat
schemes," they call them in the paper that I read. And there's any
number of them started by de Mersch or his agents. Just for what? That
de Mersch may be the richest man in the world and a philanthropist.
Well, then, where's Slingsby, if that's philanthropy? So Mr. Churchill
comes along and says, in a manner of speaking, "That's all very well,
but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we
must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with
the powers." Powers--what's powers to me?--or Greenland? when there's
Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life,
in the workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbys all over the
country.'"