We have to all intents and purposes absorbed the old F.B.C., and this has been greatly to the advantage of both concerns. The Company's mercantile position is the firmer, and we are left the freer for things both larger and more special. In the handling of these Pepper has been brilliant. True, he has taken chances, sometimes more than I have liked; but he is a born taker of chances, and it is astonishing, on the whole, how seldom things have failed to come off. In his own line I have never met his equal. I think I mentioned that he had been in Russia: I never knew exactly what his errand was there; but I can make a guess at the kind of thing. Last summer, for instance, he was out in the West Indies--with a few tin specimen-boxes and a butterfly net (this is the man who doesn't know a butterfly from a bumble-bee, and once asked me what a birch was). Out in the West Indies he met Magnay, of Astbury, Phillips--a valetudinarian after tarpon. Sichel was there too; I forget whether he was playing golf, or healing a lung, or merely yawning his head off in deck-chairs. And of course (a nod being as good as a wink to a blind horse) there could be no possible connection between these innocent pursuits and the Panama Canal, trans-shipment stations and the South American coasting trade.... So maybe Pepper had had no thought of hides or timber or tallow when he had learned the Siberian method of hunting bear.... Anyway, all I want you to understand, without making it too plain, is that we leave these things to Pepper. He dines geologists and botanists and explorers and concessionaires: he does them well, and is perfectly charming; and it may quite well be that, before he has finished with them, a little inconspicuous piece of paper that not one in a thousand as much as glances at is posted up in Whitehall one day, Britain has proclaimed a new Protectorate somewhere or other, and the Consolidation is at the bottom of it. It pays us that Pepper keeps his nails manicured and knows his way about a wine-list. It may not be noble or altruistic or anything of that kind, but it's the way things get done in this world, and be hanged to Schmerveloff and the humanitarians.