Crespo was keenly appreciative of my services and was anxious to put me in the way of making a fortune, to take the place of the ones I had lost in speculation and in trying to outdo the King of the Belgians in riotous living, to which I have ever been prone. There were then two lines of horse cars in Caracas. It seemed to me there was a good opening for an electric system, and through Crespo’s influence I secured a blanket franchise that was most sweeping in its terms. It gave me the right to parallel the existing lines and build new ones on any streets that I selected, all over the city, or, as it was unfortunately worded “all around the city.” The only literal Spanish equivalent for this, as far as I knew, was circumvalorate, and that word was used to describe my rights. I was also given the right to condemn waterfalls for thirty miles around to generate electricity. The most desirable of these natural power plants was over toward Macuto, and was owned by one of the Guzman family. I arranged to sell my franchise to a Brooklyn street railway man for three hundred thousand dollars, but when he came to investigate it he found that _circumvalorate_ meant exactly what it said, “all around the city,” and that outside of the lines parallel to the existing street railways, which were specifically provided for, he could do nothing more than build a belt line along the outside edge of the city. Crespo tried to have the franchise amended so that it would give me, in plain terms, just what I wanted and what I thought I had, but the amendment failed of passage by one vote, that of the Guzman descendant, who feared that my next move would be the condemnation of his waterfall. Naturally, the deal fell through. That one miserable word cost me just three hundred thousand dollars. I never have used it since then until now; it is too expensive for ordinary conversation.