The scene, naked and forbidding, struck him forcibly, and the great mining buildings towering in the midst of the desolation they had created looked like ugly castles of destruction. He had noted the place often before, but this morning, refreshed by the incidents of the previous day, his mind was working with unexampled ease and insight. Here, he reflected, two things of value--sulphur and vegetation--were being arduously obliterated. It suddenly appeared fundamentally against nature, and whatever violated nature was, he held, fundamentally wrong. The train stopped for a few moments and, jumping from the platform, he ran across to the nearest pile. Here he picked up several pieces of ore fresh from the mine, inhaling as he stood the sharp and killing fumes. At St. Marys he made but one kind of pulp--mechanical pulp--in which the soft wood was disintegrated by revolving stones against which it was thrust under great pressure. But he had always desired to make another kind of pulp, so now he thrust the ore samples in his pocket and climbed back into the private car. Two days later the chief chemist of the works stood beside the general manager's desk looking from the nickel samples into Clark's animated face. "These are from Sudbury," the latter was saying, "where they waste thousands of tons of sulphur a year, and it costs them a lot to waste it. I want the sulphur to make sulphite pulp." "Yes?" The reply was a little uncertain. "To buy what we want is out of the question at the present price. In Alabama and Sicily they are spending a lot of money to get sulphur; in Sudbury they're spending a lot of money to get rid of it. The thing is all wrong." "Have we any nickel mine, sir?" "No, but that's the small end of it. I want you to analyze this ore and see if you can devise a commercial process for the separation of nickel from sulphur and save both. If you can, I'll buy a mine. Incidentally we'll produce some pretty cheap nickel. Get busy!" The chemist nodded and went out, and Clark, glancing after him, fell into profound contemplation. He himself was neither engineer, chemist nor scientist, but had a natural instinct for the suitable uses of physical things. Thus, though without any advanced technical training, his brain was relieved from any consciousness of difficulties which might be encountered in the working out of the problems he set for others with such remarkable facility. He was, in truth, a practical idealist, who, ungrafted to any particular branch of effort, embarked on them all, radiating that magnetic confidence which is the chief incentive toward accomplishment.