doings. It would have been a pleasure to me to have been able to
help in carrying out any hope or ambition of yours, but I realized
that in the years intervening between your coming of age and the
present moment you were fulfilling your ideas and ambitions in your
own way, and, as I shall try to explain to you presently, my
ambitions also. You were of so adventurous a nature that even my own
widely-spread machinery of acquiring information--what I may call my
private "intelligence department"--was inadequate. My machinery was
fairly adequate for the East--in great part, at all events. But you
went North and South, and West also, and, in addition, you essayed
realms where commerce and purely real affairs have no foothold--
worlds of thought, of spiritual import, of psychic phenomena--
speaking generally, of mysteries. As now and again I was baffled in
my inquiries, I had to enlarge my mechanism, and to this end started-
-not in my own name, of course--some new magazines devoted to certain
branches of inquiry and adventure. Should you ever care to know more
of these things, Mr. Trent, in whose name the stock is left, will be
delighted to give you all details. Indeed, these stocks, like all
else I have, shall be yours when the time comes, if you care to ask
for them. By means of The Journal of Adventure, The Magazine of
Mystery, Occultism, Balloon and Aeroplane, The Submarine, Jungle and
Pampas, The Ghost World, The Explorer, Forest and Island, Ocean and
Creek, I was often kept informed when I should otherwise have been
ignorant of your whereabouts and designs. For instance, when you had
disappeared into the Forest of the Incas, I got the first whisper of
your strange adventures and discoveries in the buried cities of
Eudori from a correspondent of The Journal of Adventure long before
the details given in The Times of the rock-temple of the primeval
savages, where only remained the little dragon serpents, whose giant
ancestors were rudely sculptured on the sacrificial altar. I well