med Sydney that ate several boxes of matches and
had to have its internal fires extinguished by the only available
liquid, which was the tinned butter that had yielded to the one hundred
and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always
after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in
consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with
the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state
occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time--because they had
discovered and were making one of the great mines of West Australia.

Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining
circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had
spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over
all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally
credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone
on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big
men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American
engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be
the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new
experience were calling.

Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made
a successful _coup d'etat_ and had formed a cabinet for the first time
in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for
the first time in the history of China, to effect a cooerdinated control
of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a
Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at
its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and
hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the
Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official
to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with
other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own
benefit than China's. This official was to be in a position much like
that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given
the title, in the Chinese equivalent, of "Director-General of Mines."
He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large title. With all this
decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a
man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know,
just such a man in