"He did not ask you down here. He doesn't feel responsible for your coming. Probably Cousin Susan would need a warning before inviting two strangers to dinner."
Well, the little old schoolmaster came over in the afternoon with a very pretty steam launch. The fishing was not all a pretence. He liked to fish; but I never saw a man who listened as keenly as that man did. And I did the talking. I let him see that we were engaged on a big work; that in putting his dollars into our packing-houses he wasn't just taking a flyer, way off at the end of the earth. I had had some experience in dealing with men by this time; it was no raw young schemer who came to this party. And I had observed that what men want when they are thinking of putting their money into a new enterprise is to have confidence in the men who will spend their dollars. My experience has shown me that the cheapest thing to get in this world is money. If you have the ideas, the money will flow like water downhill. At any rate, that was the way it worked with good Mr. Farson.
We stayed there in Deer Isle three days, and had one simple meal in the banker's house after Cousin Susan had been duly warned. At the end of the time Farson thought he would give us a couple of hundred thousand dollars and take some of our bonds, and he thought maybe his brother-in-law would take a few more, and also his brother-in-law's brother. In short, Mr. Farson was the first one in a long row of bricks. He went up with us on the Boston boat, when we started back, to secure the others. It was a glorious night early in August, and, after Slocum had gone to bed, the old banker and I sat up there on the deck watching the coast fade away in the moonlight. I had never seen anything like it before in my life—the black rocks starting right out of the water, the stiff little fir trees, the steep hills rolling back from the sea.
The black rocks starting right out of the water.
"This is the prettiest thing I have ever seen!" I exclaimed. "My wife must come down here next summer."
"Yes," the old gentleman replied, with evident pleasure in my praise of his native rocks. "I can tell you that there is very little in the world to compare with the charm of this coast."
Then he began to talk of other lands, and I found that he had been all over the earth. He talked of Italy, and India, and Japan, and parts of Russia. After a time he began to ask me questions about myself, and being an easy talker, and happy over the success we had had, I told him a good deal of my story, and how I had come to enter the present undertaking. It was easy to tell him things—he had quick sympathy and was as keen as a boy. He seemed to approve of my general plan, but advised patience.
"This silver trouble will lead to a period of bad times," he remarked.