THE MASSACRE OF THE BLUE-BELLS
CHAPTER XI
THE DREAM
The “Jap Rubbish trade” was prospering mildly.
During the first two years it seemed likely to languish and die, but in the third year it woke up, got on its legs, and, to use M’Gourley’s phrase, “began to pick a bit.” In the fourth year it was bringing Leslie in some two hundred a year, a fair amount considering the capital originally invested in it.
Not that he wanted the money, he kept his interest in the thing just for something to do—a toy business to play with when he was otherwise disengaged.
As for Mac, he was getting rich, not out of the Rubbish trade, but in a manner we will hint at later on.
The House of the Clouds remained unaltered, save for a tiny landscape garden not much bigger than a dining-table which Leslie had laid out for Campanula. It lay beyond the garden walk in front of the veranda, and it had mountains and rivers and savannas of moss, and old oak trees, fierce-looking, but not much bigger than your thumb, and twisted fir trees that reflected themselves gloomily in lakes the size of hand-mirrors, and a Shinto temple about the size of a Buszard’s Dundee cake; there were also bridges across the rivers.