fairly heavy envelope) was taken unopened straight into the great man's
room, and no instructions dealing with it had ever been issued thence.
The office whispered that he answered personally--and not by dictation
either, but actually writing in his own hand, with pen and ink, and, it
was to be supposed, taking a copy in his own private press copy-book,
inaccessible to profane eyes. Some scornful young men, insignificant
pieces of minor machinery in that eleven-storey-high workshop of great
affairs, expressed frankly their private opinion that the great chief
had done at last something silly, and was ashamed of his folly; others,
elderly and insignificant, but full of romantic reverence for the
business that had devoured their best years, used to mutter darkly and
knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the Holroyd connection
meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole Republic of Costaguana, lock,
stock, and barrel. But, in fact, the hobby theory was the right one. It
interested the great man to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it
interested him so much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to
the first complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number
of years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere railway
board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A success would
have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel grounds; but, on the
other side of the same feeling, it was incumbent upon him to cast it
off utterly at the first sign of failure. A man may be thrown off. The
papers had unfortunately trumpeted all over the land his journey to
Costaguana. If he was pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he
infused an added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the
very last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould's white mules, he had said in
Charles's room--

"You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you as long