ave been a pleasure to me to have been able to
help in carrying out any hope or ambition of yours, but I realized
that in the years intervening between your coming of age and the
present moment you were fulfilling your ideas and ambitions in your
own way, and, as I shall try to explain to you presently, my
ambitions also. You were of so adventurous a nature that even my own
widely-spread machinery of acquiring information--what I may call my
private "intelligence department"--was inadequate. My machinery was
fairly adequate for the East--in great part, at all events. But you
went North and South, and West also, and, in addition, you essayed
realms where commerce and purely real affairs have no
foothold--worlds of thought, of spiritual import, of psychic
phenomena--speaking generally, of mysteries. As now and again I was
baffled in my inquiries, I had to enlarge my mechanism, and to this
end started--not in my own name, of course--some new magazines
devoted to certain branches of inquiry and adventure. Should you
ever care to know more of these things, Mr. Trent, in whose name the
stock is left, will be delighted to give you all details. Indeed,
these stocks, like all else I have, shall be yours when the time
comes, if you care to ask for them. By means of _The Journal of
Adventure_, _The Magazine of Mystery_, _Occultism_, _Balloon and
Aeroplane_, _The Submarine_, _Jungle and Pampas_, _The Ghost World_,
_The Explorer_, _Forest and Island_, _Ocean and Creek_, I was often
kept informed when I should otherwise have been ignorant of your
whereabouts and designs. For instance, when you had disappeared into
the Forest of the Incas, I got the first whisper of your strange
adventures and discoveries in the buried cities of Eudori from a
correspondent of _The Journal of Adventure_ long before the details
given in _The Times_ of the rock-temple of the primeval savages,
where only remained the little dragon serpents, whose giant ancestors
were rudely sculptured on the sacrificial altar. I well remember how
I thrilled at even that meagre account of your going in alone into
that veritable hell. It was from _Occultism_ that I learned how you
had made a stay alone in the haunted catacombs of Elora, in the far
recesses of the Himalayas, and of the fearful experiences which, when
you came out