Western Australia.

CHAPTER V

IN CHINA

When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the
new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should
know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit
man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought
himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some
business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been
the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which
Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West
Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a
suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of
Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London
mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by
which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making
the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in
the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he
did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen
Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to
the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and
confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing,
promptly accepted it.

In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight
devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his
way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own
affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He
wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of
what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese
Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a
little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he
tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in
thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough
typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's
office in San Francisco.

However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the
Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental
trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from
there his second start to the far-away lands fr