from any direction. London frequently had a seven days' fog, and
sometimes a seven days' calm, but these two conditions never coincided
until the last year of the last century. The coincidence, as everyone
knows, meant death--death so wholesale that no war the earth has ever
seen left such slaughter behind it. To understand the situation, one
has only to imagine the fog as taking the place of the ashes at
Pompeii, and the coal-smoke as being the lava that covered it. The
result to the inhabitants in both cases was exactly the same.




IV.--THE AMERICAN WHO WANTED TO SELL.


I was at the time confidential clerk to the house of Fulton, Brixton &
Co., a firm in Cannon Street, dealing largely in chemicals and chemical
apparatus. Fulton I never knew; he died long before my time. Sir John
Brixton was my chief, knighted, I believe, for services to his party,
or because he was an official in the City during some royal progress
through it; I have forgotten which. My small room was next to his large
one, and my chief duty was to see that no one had an interview with Sir
John unless he was an important man or had important business. Sir John
was a difficult man to see, and a difficult man to deal with when he
was seen. He had little respect for most men's feelings, and none at
all for mine. If I allowed a man to enter his room who should have been
dealt with by one of the minor members of the company, Sir John made no
effort to conceal his opinion of me. One day, in the autumn of the last
year of the century, an American was shown into my room. Nothing would
do but he must have an interview with Sir John Brixton. I told him that