f their component parts, making a list of
over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure
from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole
earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.

* * * * *

I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn
streets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults,
etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris,
and then lying in the _Speranza_ at Dover; nor had I sufficient
familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the
aid of _Bottins_, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now
catalogued. My ship was the _Speranza_, which brought me from Havre, for
at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all
purposes, the _Speranza_ being an American yacht, very palatially
fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000
tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting
tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables me
to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting
air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons
only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days' work
at the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw out
her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on
the quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and the
half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to
Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of
dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London:
meaning to make Dover my _depot_, and the London rails my thoroughfare
from all parts of the country.

Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: a
harrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from
the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as
well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: for
the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down
sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake.
However, all's well that ends well, though if I had it to go through
again, certainly I should not. The _Speranza_ is now lying seven miles
off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being t