It was a fine, soft summer evening, with a faint breeze stirring the trees, and now and then lifting a scrap of paper from the roadway and dropping it again languidly after it had tumbled it a few yards. There were not many people on the Embankment; those that were there consisting chiefly of engaged couples, with here and there a tattered piece of human wreckage apparently on the look-out for a comfortable open-air lodging for the coming night. I sauntered slowly on, clinking Billy's two sovereigns in my pocket, and pondering idly over my own affairs. I had left Bolivia four months before in high spirits, thinking that for the first time in my life I had the chance of making some money. That I had found gold in richly paying quantities I had no shadow of doubt, and I felt confident that in London I should be able to raise sufficient capital to get together a proper expedition for penetrating the interior. I knew enough of the Bolivian authorities to be sure that, as far as State permission went, a generous measure of bribery was the only thing necessary. Seven or eight weeks in England had been enough to dash all my high hopes. I suppose English business men are naturally cautious--requiring to know a great deal about a stranger's record before they care to accept his statement. Now my record, though highly interesting to myself, had been of a little too chequered a nature to inspire confidence in the breast of a capitalist whose ideas of life are bounded by Lombard Street and, shall we say, Maidenhead. At all events, I had failed dismally in my purpose, and, as I had told Billy, had reached the end of my resources without getting any further in my quest than when I had started. I was not sorry to feel that it was all over. My restless life had ill fitted me for the humdrum respectabilities of London, and I was beginning to regard the streets, the people, and indeed everything about me, with an intense and ever-growing distaste. It is true, that New York would be as bad or even worse, but I had no real intention of wasting much time in that shrieking inferno. To start with, my funds would not allow it; and, in any case, I was beginning to get a bit tired of this dreary chase after wealth. If I could find a sympathetic capitalist in a few days, well and good--otherwise, I had quite made up my mind not to worry any more about the matter. Let the gold stop where it was until some traveller more suited to the job than I stumbled across it. Life, after all, is the first thing, and I was not going to waste mine hanging round office doors, and interviewing fat gentlemen in frock-coats, when the whole world with all its fun and adventure lay before me.