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Nasmyth's story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intense picture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey business affairs. I kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth's intermittent appearances in England. Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its effect.
"We're always getting chances like that," said my uncle, cocking his cigar offensively, wiping his glasses and tilting his chair back. "We stick to a safe twenty." Gordon-Nasmyth's quick temper showed in a slight stiffening of his attitude. "Don't you believe him," said I, getting up before he could reply. "You're different, and I know your books. We're very glad you've come to us.
"I thought you were going to analyse it yourself," he said with the touching persuasion of the layman that a scientific man knows and practises at the sciences. I made some commercial inquiries, and there seemed even then much truth in Gordon-Nasmyth's estimate of the value of the stuff.
This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds and Gordon-Nasmyth's original genius had already given the enterprise. Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow, dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like nothing else in my life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man.
I've still the vividest memory of Gordon-Nasmyth's appearance in the inner sanctum, a lank, sunburnt person in tweeds with a yellow-brown hatchet face and one faded blue eye the other was a closed and sunken lid and how he told us with a stiff affectation of ease his incredible story of this great heap of quap that lay abandoned or undiscovered on the beach behind Mordet's Island among white dead mangroves and the black ooze of brackish water.
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