"My good sir, you seem to have put your foot into it very badly indeed. It looks as though you, and all those involved with you, will crash through the very thin ice you are skating upon. It looks to me an odds-on chance that you will all be drowned in the financial vortex beneath. I don't for the life of me see how a poor insignificant journalist like myself can be of any real service to you. So you need not worry about your 100,000 kroner or any other sum. What fragment of weight do you suppose that so great a personage as our Minister would attach to either my words or to my presence--to me, a stranger and an ordinary civilian?" In a tense, hoarse voice he replied: "You forget you are English, an English journalist, representing the most powerful newspaper in London. Everyone is afraid of newspapers. They can uproot a throne. I know. I have lived in London. I have seen what a newspaper can do. You are cool. Your nerves are strong. You are a man of the world. You can state my case as it would be impossible for me to state it myself. Let the English Government buy my oil at its own price. I don't want an exorbitant profit. I will leave the negotiation to your absolute discretion. Prohibition would ruin me. You can save me if you will only try. I will willingly pay you any sum you like to name. If you stave off the threatened prohibition you will earn it ten times over. You may even save our country from war. I have not slept for nights. I cannot eat properly. Unless this strain on me is relieved I feel my brain will give way and I shall go mad, or I shall kill myself." He sat down heavily upon a chair, and, burying his head in his hands, wept aloud. Allowing a reasonable time for the unhappy merchant to settle down to a more even frame of mind, I placed my hand upon his shoulder, not unkindly, and said in a soft voice: "Well, I'm afraid I shall not carry much weight, and I don't want your money, but I will go and see him. One thing is quite certain. You can rest assured that England would never knowingly permit an injustice to be done; but if you're trading with the Germans, then of course you'll have to paddle your own canoe." Further inquiries from the now subservient speculator elicited the existence of a contract made with German merchants by which a by-product of the oil passing through his hands in the ordinary course of business, amounting to about five per cent. of the whole, had to be delivered to them periodically for some few months to follow.