d
obtain those lands you have desired, and you should obtain black men to
labour on them and make to yourself great wealth; or should you create
that company"--Peter started--"and fools should buy from you, so that
you became the richest man in the land; and if you should take to
yourself wide lands, and raise to yourself great palaces, so that
princes and great men of earth crept up to you and laid their hands
against yours, so that you might slip gold into them--what would it
profit you?"

"Profit!" Peter Halket stared: "Why, it would profit everything.
What makes Beit and Rhodes and Barnato so great? If you've got eight
millions--"

"Peter Simon Halket, which of those souls you have seen on earth is to
you greatest?" said the stranger, "Which soul is to you fairest?"

"Ah," said Peter, "but we weren't talking of souls at all; we were
talking of money. Of course if it comes to souls, my mother's the best
person I've ever seen. But what does it help her? She's got to stand
washing clothes for those stuck-up nincompoops of fine ladies! Wait till
I've got money! It'll be somebody else then, who--"

"Peter Halket," said the stranger, "who is the greatest; he who serves
or he who is served?" Peter looked at the stranger: then it flashed on
him that he was mad.

"Oh," he said, "if it comes to that, what's anything! You might as well
say, sitting there in your old linen shirt, that you were as great as
Rhodes or Beit or Barnato, or a king. Of course a man's just the same
whatever he's got on or whatever he has; but he isn't the same to other
people."

"There have kings been born in stables," said the stranger.

Then Peter saw that he was joking, and laughed. "It must have been a
long time ago; they don't get born there now," he said. "Why, if God
Almighty came to this country, and hadn't half-a-million in shares, they
wouldn't think much of Him."

Peter built up his fire. Suddenly he felt the stranger's eyes were fixed
on him.

"Who gave you your land?" the stranger asked.

"Mine! Why, the Chartered Company," said Peter.

The stranger looked back into the fire. "And who gave it to them?" he
asked softly.

"Why, England, of course. She gave them the land to far beyond the
Zambezi to do what they liked with, and make as much money out of as
they could, and she'd back 'em."

"Who gave the land to the men and women of England?" asked the stranger
softly.

"Why, the devil! They said it was theirs, and of cours