distinguished him from the uninspired who were content to concentrate
themselves on steel, wheat and such-like things. It was Mr. Scobell's
way to consider nothing as lying outside his sphere. In a financial
sense he might have taken Terence's _Nihil humanum alienum_ as his
motto. He was interested in innumerable enterprises, great and small.
He was the power behind a company which was endeavoring, without much
success, to extract gold from the mountains of North Wales, and another
which was trying, without any success at all, to do the same by sea
water. He owned a model farm in Indiana, and a weekly paper in New
York. He had financed patent medicines, patent foods, patent corks,
patent corkscrews, patent devices of all kinds, some profitable, some
the reverse.

Also--outside the ordinary gains of finance--he had expectations. He
was the only male relative of his aunt, the celebrated Mrs. Jane
Oakley, who lived in a cottage on Staten Island, and was reputed to
spend five hundred dollars a year--some said less--out of her snug
income of eighteen million. She was an unusual old lady in many ways,
and, unfortunately, unusually full of deep-rooted prejudices. The fear
lest he might inadvertently fall foul of these rarely ceased to haunt
Mr. Scobell.

This man of many projects had descended upon Mervo like a stone on the
surface of some quiet pool, bubbling over with modern enterprise in
general and, in particular, with a scheme. Before his arrival, Mervo
had been an island of dreams and slow movement and putting things off
till to-morrow. The only really energetic thing it had ever done in its
whole history had been to expel his late highness, Prince Charles, and
change itself into a republic. And even that had been done with the
minimum of fuss. The Prince was away at the time. Indeed, he had been