candlesticks, if only he could raise the other
twelve.

This promising scheme took an incubus off my mind, and I hastened,
somewhat revengefully, to acquaint the professional philanthropist,
who had been so barren of ideas, with my intention to set up Quarriar
as a piece-sorter.

'Ah,' Sir Asher replied, unmoved. 'Then you had better employ my man
Conn; he does a good deal of this sort of work for me. He will find
Quarriar a partner and professor.'

'But Quarriar has already found a partner.' I explained the scheme.

'The partner will cheat him. Twenty pounds is ridiculous. Five pounds
is quite enough. Take my advice, and let it all go through Conn. If I
wanted my portrait painted, you wouldn't advise me to go to an
amateur. By the way, here are the five pounds, but please don't tell
Conn I gave them. I don't believe the money'll do any good, and Conn
will lose his respect for me.'

My interest in piece-sorting--an occupation I had never even heard of
before--had grown abnormally, and I had gone into the figures and
quantities--so many hundredweights, purchased at fifteen shillings,
sorted into lots, and sold at various prices--with as thorough-going
an eagerness as if my own livelihood were to depend upon it.

I confess I was now rather bewildered by so serious a difference of
estimate as to the cost of a partnership, but I was inclined to set
down Sir Asher's scepticism to that pessimism which is the penalty of
professional philanthropy.

On the other hand, I felt that whether the partnership was to cost
five pounds or twenty, Quarriar's future would be safer from Kazelias
under the auspices of Sir Asher and his Conn. So I handed the latter
the five pounds, and bade him find Quarriar a guide, philosopher, and
partner.

With the advent of Conn, all my troubles began, and the picture passed
into its third and last stage.

I soon elicited that Quarriar and his friends were rather sorry Conn
had been introduced into the matter. He was alleged to favour some
people at the expense of others, and to be not at all popular among
the people amid whom he worked. And altogether it was abundantly clear
that Quarriar would rather have gone on with the scheme in his own way
without official interference.

Later, Sir Asher wrote to me direct that the partner put forward by
the Quarriar faction was a shady customer; Conn had selected his own
man, but even so there was little hope Quarriar's future would be thus
provided