It’s an odd thing, isn’t it, what the human mind’ll do to you! While he was talking in the office there, running as smooth as you like, the brakes suddenly went on, the wheels creaked, and he came to a dead stop, and all without the slightest volition on his part. Now, as he sat there near the pond and the shouting children, he slowly came to a realization of the reason why a certain safety device installed somewhere in his mental machinery, had automatically brought him to a standstill. It would be impossible to explain the device and its operation to anyone without ruining every chance it had. That is, _unless the people he explained it to took it_—and how could he be sure they would? Suddenly, after a length of time of which he had no idea, he got to his feet. There was hope yet! A ray of hope! He would think up some sort of _similar_ affair—a proposition involving the same sort of risks yet in reality nothing like it. This he would describe to a man he was trying to interest in the thing, speaking of it casually, not as anything of his own, but as an odd thing he’d heard of—a man he knew had gone into it, and so on. From the remarks and behavior of a person to whom he described this similar proposition, it was Haworth’s idea that he could gain a pretty clear indication as to whether the man would go into such a thing himself if he got the opportunity; and when he found one who would, he could safely let him know exactly what it was. There was no time to waste. He walked rapidly away, trying mightily to conceive of some scheme that would give hazards corresponding to his own, yet bearing no dangerous similarity to it. Among the few men with whom he had had business dealings, he selected the manager of a machine shop—one Mat Williams—as being the most likely to be attracted. By the time he got to Williams’s place he had something roughly thought out to test him with, and as soon as he could get him aside he began telling about a friend of his who had gone into a most unusual enterprise—which enterprise he described at length. Williams was naturally astonished that Haworth should come there to tell him an absurd and apparently pointless anecdote, and when the young man began demanding avidly what he thought of it, Williams decided that the fellow had gone completely off his nut. He was sorry, but the only course seemed to be to get rid of him as soon as possible, which he did, smoothing things over with pleasant talk and a hurried handshake. Haworth was cut up a bit, though he had no idea how bad it really was. But as he tried one after another with his singular method of diagnosing their speculative propensities, and found that every one of them, instead of talking business, tried to get away from him as soon as he possibly could, his hope began to ebb.