My old friend has confessed to me that, for some moments, he was in dread lest Major Pondo might be dumb. He was even seized with a terror that the man was ill-acquainted with the English language, until the word “Yas!” mouthed out in the rich accent of Jamaica, convinced him that he was in error. It was the prelude to a short account, delivered as it were by rote, of the Major’s life and adventures, at the close of which dark silence redescended. Mr Burden, so far from finding his suspicions allayed, was tortured with every manner of doubt. If it were my purpose to defend my friend, I should find no difficulty in holding such a brief. It must be remembered that he was wholly ignorant of the new world into which he had wandered, and that men such as Major Pondo, or indeed any other of those who yearly and almost daily spread the bounds of our power, were quite unknown to him. His irritability and unstable spirit, the result, as I still believe, of old age, have been evident throughout these pages, and it must be added that the hour was late—far later than the merchant would have permitted himself had he obeyed his medical adviser—that the glare, the heat, the multitude, all combined to arouse in him a morbid judgment, and to enflame distorted views which were due in the main to the failure of his health. But it is not my business to defend him. I have no duty but to enumerate quite simply, the facts in their order. Were I to trespass upon another ground, I might find myself in competition with the labours of Mr and Mrs O’Rourke, the very mention of whose existence I particularly desire to avoid. Be the cause what it may, when Mr Barnett returned to lead Mr Burden to another guest, so far from having brought my friend into greater harmony with the astounding energies of the new movement, he had produced, by that interview with Major Pondo, a sentiment—I repeat it, a morbid sentiment—approaching disgust. There was nothing which, at that moment, Mr Burden would not have believed. There was no anti-patriotic libel, no little-England mania or lie, no dead and gone Cobdenism of the sixties, which he would not have accepted after that brief experience. He left the house that night, full of a kind of angry determination to go next day and do what he had never yet dared to do: to speak to Mr Abbott. But he would speak to him in a sense very different from that which Mr Barnett had intended when he had asked him to call upon that life-long friend, and to offer him a directorship.... He would see Abbott, he would tell him of the risk to a considerable fortune, of his doubts, of the torturing alternation of his mind: he would find true stable comradeship and relief. Fate, and the nature of men, led on to their meeting indeed, but brought it, in spite of them both, to a very different end. * * * * *