The governor sat down in his chair more hurriedly than he had anticipated, drew out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Are you telling the truth, or is this--is this--What you say, my lord, is incredible.” “Very well, come up to the Great Western goods depot, and see for yourself. I have always avoided the city as a cynical place, but I had no idea that unbelief was so prevalent there as it seems.” “A thousand tons of gold! Worth a hundred and ten million pounds sterling!” “There, you see how easy it is to calculate when a man who knows figures gets at it. Is that what my thousand tons is worth?” “Where did this gold come from?” “From the West African coast; a very valuable surface mine I own there. We’ve been working most of the year transporting the ore to Cornwall and smelting it, tossing the ingots down into an empty copper mine I own, which I call my safe deposit vault.” “How much do you demand for this gold?” “Oh, I don’t demand anything at all. I’m no business man, as I told you. It struck me that the gold was quite as safe in your vaults as in my copper mine, therefore I engaged a special train to bring half of it up. You can have the other half if you wish.” “My lord, will you accompany me in my automobile to the Great Western goods depot, and show me that special train of yours?” “Governor, I shall be delighted.” A few mornings later Lord Stranleigh sat at his appetizing breakfast, and smiled as he read the leading article in the _Times_: “As our readers know, we did not join in the outcry of the sensational press which did so much to mislead public opinion both in England and America. Never for an instant, during all the tumult, did our faith in that greatest and most venerable of financial institutions, the Bank of England, waver. On October the fourteenth we pointed out the impossibility of cornering gold, no matter how powerful the financial syndicate might be which undertook his labor of Sisyphus. How long this treasure, whose very figures read like some romance of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ has lain in the vaults of the bank, no one but the governor, and those in his confidence, can tell. While the country was ringing with predictions of failure on the part of the bank to conform with a new and absurd law, those responsible for the direction of our leading financial institution quietly and in silence had gathered together the almost unimaginable amount of three hundred million pounds’ worth sterling of virgin gold. Those journals which for the past four months have been foremost in deluding their readers, and bringing a crisis on the country, are now loud in their denunciation of the governor of the bank for not speaking sooner. But if the governor of the bank undertook to reply to statements, malicious or ignorant, concerning the institution over which he so worthily presides, there would be little time left for him to perform those functions that he has so ably accomplished.