Upon lines so original and so daring, a new system of banking seemed destined to arise. No limit threatened the expansion of the business, till a venomous article, inspired perhaps wholly by political hatred, suggested that the interest already paid could only come out of the new capital daily furnished to the concern. A panic followed this abominable insinuation (the scoundrel had not the courage to set it down for a fact), and within twenty-four hours, the Haymarket Bank was ruined. Had Mr Barnett alone suffered by this underhand attack, he would have felt it less; he was still a young man and might retrieve his own fortunes. But the thought of decent middle-class ladies, of poor and struggling clergymen ruined, not through their own fault, but because they had trusted too thoroughly in him, was more than he could bear. I have often heard him speak of those painful days, and he has never failed to point out that the same hands which wantonly destroyed the Haymarket Bank are responsible for the pestilent Little-Englandism which would (if it could) drag him down from the great place he holds to-day. The same spite that blasted the high promise of his ambitions in pure finance, would—had it the power—wither that climax of applied finance which is but another word for Imperial endeavour: but the M’Korio Delta and all it means is now beyond the power of such enemies. For years Mr Barnett lay silent and obscure under the stigma of this failure. He visited Vienna, Constantinople, and Calcutta: he was concerned with the Anatolian Railway extension: it failed, and he again withdrew. Passing through Cairo he enjoyed the simple hospitality of the devout Harburys, and learnt from the morning, noontide, and evening prayers of that secluded household, a peace he had not yet known. He attached the younger Harbury to himself as secretary, and set out with a higher heart to retrieve his fortunes. He was instrumental in procuring a very necessary sum of money for the Vidame de Sorral: that nobleman, with the careless generosity of his rank, disbursed a considerable portion of his new found wealth upon a yacht, wherein, overcoming a senseless and unchristian repugnance, he took his benefactor for a short cruise upon the African coast. It was in these circumstances that Mr I. Z. Barnett, these few short years since, first set eyes upon the land he was to render famous. They were anchored off the western mouth of the M’Korio. The morning was intensely hot, without a breath of wind. The trees that marked the swampy edge of the Delta shimmered in a kind of mirage, and to the left, on the high land some three miles away, a few white dots marked the settlement and the governor’s house. How often has not Mr Barnett told the story! His idle curiosity, the two days’ shooting which his host and he took in the marshes, the slight fever, the British flag at morning, and then suddenly, an inspiration wholly new, the vision of what this place was to be!