'All right, gov'nor. What is this the preface to?'
'Sampy,' said Tramplara, confidingly, 'we must start another mine.'
'What—tin? lead? manganese? copper?'
'Better still, my gosling.'
'I don't know what you can have better except coal, and coal don't luxuriate alongside of granite.'
'Gold—the noblest of metals—gold.'
'Oh, ah! gov'nor, that won't do. There's no gold to be found here.'
'Why not?'
'Why not? Because no folks are fools enough to sink it in such a venture as gold mining.'
'You are wrong. There is one quality I can always rely on—as the Apostle says, "Folly never faileth, everything else may vanish away." If you appeal to men's reasons, it is like looking for ghosts in haunted tenements; they are supposed to be there, but never found when wanted. Human folly is like Dozmare pool, it is unfathomable, though you let down into it all the bell-ropes of Cornwall. You can set up windmills in Essex, for there the wind always blows; and you can establish water wheels in Cornwall, for the rain supply is inexhaustible; and you can float speculations where you will, and the fools will keep them going. In the story of the Fisherman in the "Arabian Nights" the fish that have been scraped and disembowelled and put in a frying-pan over the coals stand up on their tails and say, "We are doing our duty. If you reckon we reckon; if you fly we mount and are content." Now those fish we are told were men. And men are just the same now. They do their duty in coming to be scraped and gutted and roasted, and what you pipe they repeat; they have no pleasure apart from yours, and they rush into your hands to be cleaned out, just as the martyrs asked to be tortured.'