Edward was so taken up with the insult offered to his father that he did not notice as we came to the tramway terminus, from which the road to Magnolia Hall branched off, a newspaper placard on which were displayed the lines:
Disgraceful Brawl at Society Gathering.
Well-Known Names Involved.
Who is Mr. John Howard?
Well, if that question was going to interest the inhabitants of Upsidonia, it seemed about time for me to be making arrangements for the modest competency that would enable me to leave the country.
[CHAPTER XX]
I woke up the next morning without that sense of something delightful about to happen to me to which I had grown accustomed since my arrival in Upsidonia, but soon brightened again as I laid my plans for acquiring an easy and immediate fortune. I knew that a rich man in Upsidonia would present me with twenty or thirty thousand pounds as readily as a poor man in England would allow me to present him with it, and would thank his lucky stars at finding a fool big enough to take it. I only had to find the rich man.
It seemed to me that I already knew who to apply to. I had made the acquaintance of a very rich man indeed, when I had gone district visiting with Mrs. Perry. His name was Hobson, and he had not always been as rich as he was at present. Mining speculations had ruined him. He could not touch a thing that turned out right. So sure as he bought shares in a mine that was supposed to have no gold in it, it turned out to be one of the richest ever heard of. And even silver played him false; he had come his biggest cropper over a worked-out silver mine, in which antimony or some such metal was discovered the moment the shares seemed to be worth nothing, with the consequence that they had jumped up again to unheard-of altitudes.