y having liquor poured
into it. If he ate--as he did--twice as much as the average keen-set
sportsman, he drank as much as the average hopeless drunkard, and no man
could have guessed from his speech, or acts, or aspect that he was not
a total abstainer. Paul, too, began to discover that he had a cast-iron
pot of a head, and took an infantile pride in the fact; but this kind of
vanity was not often indulged in, and he had no physical predisposition
to it.

Darco made money by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation.
Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels.
It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to
think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour
and enjoyment in them. Every week showed him a new town or city: classic
Edinburgh, dirty Glasgow--cleaner nowadays--roaring Liverpool, rainy
Manchester, smoke-clouded Birmingham and Sheffield, granite-built
Aberdeen, jolly Dublin, with an unaccustomed twang in the whisky, after
the Scottish progress; Belfast, Cork, Waterford. Everywhere character
studies in shoals; dialect studies every day and all day long. Paul
could train his tongue, before the twelve months' tour was over, to the
speech of Exeter, or Norwich, or Brighton, or Newcastle, or Berwick,
or Aberdeen, or Cork, or the black North. He set himself to the task
conscientiously, and with a rich enjoyment. What a Gargantuan table was
the world!

How lovable, laughable, hateful were the men who sat at it! What a feast
of feeling was spread daily!

The tour came near to its end, and Darco was arranging a new series
for half a dozen companies, so that work grew furious. A man might
have commanded an army or ruled a great department of State with
less expenditure of energy. There was no advertising or consulting of
agencies, but everything was done by personal letter. There were reams
and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts
with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and
scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized
mass of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing
three men's work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came
near him. He could be princely with it all in his own way.

'You haf learned your pusiness, young Armstrong,' he said to Paul when
the rush was over. 'I gan deach anypoty his pusiness if he is not a
vool. I am Cheorg