In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly "on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English." His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America, and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an expatriate. But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is. After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however, too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.