e grocery," said Gordon-Nasmyth scornfully,
sitting down and helping himself to one of my uncle's cigars. "I'm sorry
I came. But, still, now I'm here.... And first as to quap; quap, sir, is
the most radio-active stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festering
mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium,
carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk--provisionally.
There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it
is, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some young creator
had been playing about there. There it lies in two heaps, one small,
one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and
dead. You can have it for the getting. You've got to take it--that's
all!"

"That sounds all right," said I. "Have you samples?"

"Well--should I? You can have anything--up to two ounces."

"Where is it?"...

His blue eye smiled at me and scrutinised me. He smoked and was
fragmentary for a time, fending off my questions; then his story began
to piece itself together. He conjured up a vision of this strange
forgotten kink in the world's littoral, of the long meandering channels
that spread and divaricate and spend their burden of mud and silt within
the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that
creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense
of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last
comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead
trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and
a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred....
A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandoned
station,--abandoned because every man who stayed two months at that
station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with its
dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique piles
and planks, still insecurely possible.

And in the midst, two clumsy heaps shaped like the backs of hogs, one
small, one great, sticking out under a rib of rock that cuts the space
across,--quap!

"There it is," said Gordon-Nasmyth, "worth three pounds an ounce, if
it's worth a penny; two great heaps of it, rotten stuff and soft, ready
to shovel and wheel, and you may get it by the ton!"

"How did it get there?"

"God knows! ... There it is--for the taking! In a country where you
mustn't trade. In a country where the