e set to
work to collect what information he could about the country. The
library of the House of Commons was useless to him. Megalia is the
only country in the world about which no Blue Book ever has been
published. A belief existed among certain city men interested in
mining speculation, that there was copper in the mountains of Megalia;
but no one had any exact information on the subject. Longwood, the
Balkan correspondent of the New York Press, was in London at this
time, and Gorman got hold of him. He had little to say about Megalia
except that all the inhabitants are brigands. Steinwitz, managing
director of the Cyrenian Sea Steam Navigation Company, professed to be
interested in Megalia. He was certainly interested in the fact that
Gorman was making inquiries about the country. He said that there were
no harbours or possible ports of call on the Megalian coast.

"Nothing," he said, "can be done with that country. Nothing at all.
There is no trade, no traffic of any kind. And there cannot be. If
there were anything to be done in Megalia, we should have had a
steamer going there. Our ships pass the coast. But they do not call.
Never."

This interview, curiously enough, was the one thing which gave Gorman
any hope. Steinwitz was plainly anxious to discourage inquiries about
Megalia. And Steinwitz had the reputation of being a very astute man.

Gorman tabulated the information he had acquired. He produced, after
some thought, a few notes on Megalia which might be embodied in a
plausible prospectus.

1. A Megalian Development Company would have a clear field
and no competition to face. Gorman felt that this was a fair
deduction from the fact that nobody knew anything definite
about the country.

2. The mineral wealth of Megalia is untapped. Nobody had
ever taken any copper from the mountains and nobody denied
that it was there. It was therefore fair to say that the
mineral wealth of the country was untapped.

3. The inhabitants are energetic and enterprising, a
vigorous and courageous race. Sluggards and decadents, so
Gorman felt, do not become brigands.

That was all the material Gorman had to work with. Except the one
fact, which could not be published, that Steinwitz, the director of a
German Shipping Company with its headquarters in London, did not want
public attention turned to Megalia. The floating of a company, even if
the King offered every conc