patriate.

But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding
happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It
is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his
otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this
happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way,
only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who
would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.

After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of
the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering
proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over
a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the
issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the
defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held
legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside
with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the
obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of
his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion
with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however,
too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.

There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior
partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without
actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the
business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four
years' struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the
American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had
experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection
with the firm and launched on that career of independent and
self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in
1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading
consulting mining engineer in the world.

His work soon took him back to Australia, the land of his first notable
success, but this time into South Australia instead of West Australia.
Here he took personal charge of a large constructive undertaking in
connection with the rehabilitation of the famous Broken Hill Mines.
These mines were in the inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert,
four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, the port city. The living
and working cond