qualities which they possess, there is no shadow of doubt
about them for I myself am a proof. Yet you take one's breath away with
your schemes. How could you, out of two beans, provide a food for
millions?"

The professor smiled.

"Science will do it, my dear Mr. Burton," he replied, with some note of
patronage in his tone, "science, the highways of which to you are an
untrodden road. I myself am a chemist. I myself, before I felt the
call of Assyria, have made discoveries not wholly unimportant. This
afternoon I spent four hours in my laboratory with one of your beans. I
tell you frankly that I have discovered constituents in that small
article which absolutely stupefy me, qualities which no substance on
earth that I know of, in the vegetable or mineral world, possesses. Yet
within a week, the chemist whom I have engaged to come to my assistance
and I will assuredly have resolved that little bean into a definite
formula. When we have done that, the rest is easy. Its primary
constituents will form the backbone of our new food. If we are only
able to reproduce them in trifling quantities, then we must add a larger
proportion of some harmless and negative substance. The matter is
simple."

"No worry about that, that I can see," Mr. Bunsome remarked. "So long
as we have this testimony of Mr. Burton's, and the professor's
introduction and explanation, we don't really need the bean at all.
We've only got to print his story, get hold of some tasteless sort of
stuff that no one can exactly analyze, and the whole thing's done so far
as we are concerned. Of course, whether it takes on or not with the
public is always a bit of a risk, but the risk doesn't lie with us to
control. It depends entirely upon the advertisements. If we are able
to engage Rentoul, and raise enough money to give him a free hand for
the posters as well as the literary matter, why then, I tell you, this
moral food will turn out to be the greatest boom of the generation."

Mr. Cowper moved a little uneasily in his chair.

"Yours, Mr. Bunsome," he said, "is purely the commercial point of view.
So far as Mr. Burton and I are concerned, and Mr. Bomford, too, you
must please remember that we are profoundly and absolutely convinced of
the almost miraculous properties of this preparation. Its romantic
history is a thing we have thoroughly attested. Our only fear at the
present moment is that too large a quantity of the constituents of the
beans which Mr. Bu