of cribbing.
He denied the charge, the matter was investigated, the papers were
compared, and the man who gave good advice was disqualified. In all his
other papers he had done incomparably better than anyone else.

When he left Oxford the man who gave good advice went into a Government
office. He had not been in it long before he perceived that by certain
simple reforms the work of the office could be done twice as effectually
and half as expensively. He embodied these reforms in a memorandum and
they were not long afterwards adopted. He became private secretary to
Snipe, a rising politician and persuaded him to change his party and his
politics. Snipe, owing to this advice, became a Cabinet Minister, and
the man who gave good advice, having inherited some money, stood for
Parliament himself. He stood as a Conservative at a General Election and
spoke eloquently to enthusiastic meetings. The wire-pullers prophecied
an overwhelming majority, when shortly before the poll, at one of his
meetings, he suddenly declared himself to be an Independent, and made a
speech violently in favour of Home Rule and conscription. The result was
that the Liberal Imperialist got in by a huge majority, and the man who
gave good advice was pelted with rotten eggs.

After this the man who gave good advice abandoned politics and took to
finance; in this branch of human affairs he made the fortune of several
of his friends, preventing some from putting their money in alluring
South African schemes, and advising others to risk theirs on events
which seemed to him certain, such as the election of a President or
the short-lived nature of a revolution; events which he foresaw with
intuition amounting to second-sight. At the same time he lost nearly
all his own money by investing it in a company which professed to
have discovered a manner--cheap and rapid--of transforming copper
into platinum. He made the fortune of a publisher by insisting on the
publication of a novel which six intelligent men had declared to be
unreadable. It was called "The Conscience of John Digby," and when
published it sold by thousands and tens of thousands. But he lost the
handsome reward he received for this service by publishing at his own
expense, on magnificent paper, an edition of Rabelais' works in their
original tongue. He frequently spotted winners for his friends and for
himself, but any money that he won at a race meeting he invariably lost
coming home in the trai