property, not forgetting the piece of gold) and more particularly to
develop the vegetable resources of the district with the view of
planting rubber trees in the immediate future. A neatly compiled
prospectus put matters very clearly before the stay-at-home
Englishman. It explained quite concisely that, supposing the trees
were planted so many feet apart throughout the whole property of
five thousand square miles, and allowing a certain period for the
growth of a tree to maturity, and putting the average yield of
rubber per tree at, in round figures, so much, and assuming for the
sake of convenience that rubber would remain at its present price,
and estimating the cost of working the plantation at say, roughly,
100,000 pounds, why, then it was obvious that the profits would be
anything you liked up to two billion a year--while (this was
important) more land could doubtless be acquired if the share-
holders thought fit. And even if you were certain that a rubber-tree
couldn't possibly grow in the Bango-Bango district (as in confidence
it couldn't), still it was worth taking shares purely as an
investment, seeing how rapidly rubber was going up; not to mention
the fact that Roger St Verax, the well-known financier, was a
Director ... and so on.

In short the Bango-Bango Development Company was, in the language of
the City, a safe thing.

Let me hasten to the end of this story. At the end of 1910 Roger was
a millionaire; and for quite a week afterwards he used to wonder
where all the money had come from. In the old days, when he won a
cool thousand by betting, he knew that somebody else had lost a cool
thousand by betting, but it did not seem to be so in this case. He
had met hundreds of men who had made fortunes through rubber; he had