evelop into tragedies,
and the bagatelle of one day ripens into the catastrophe of the next.
An oyster throws out a secretion to surround a grain of sand, and so a
pearl comes into being; a pearl diver fishes it up, a merchant buys
it and sells it to a jeweller, who disposes of it to a customer. The
customer is robbed of it by two scoundrels who quarrel over the booty.
One slays the other, and perishes himself upon the scaffold. Here is
a direct chain of events with a sick mollusc for its first link, and a
gallows for its last one. Had that grain of sand not chanced to wash in
between the shells of the bivalve, two living breathing beings with all
their potentialities for good and for evil would not have been blotted
out from among their fellows. Who shall undertake to judge what is
really small and what is great?

Thus when in the year 1821 Don Diego Salvador bethought him that if it
paid the heretics in England to import the bark of his cork oaks, it
would pay him also to found a factory by which the corks might be cut
and sent out ready made, surely at first sight no very vital human
interests would appear to be affected. Yet there were poor folk who
would suffer, and suffer acutely--women who would weep, and men who
would become sallow and hungry-looking and dangerous in places of which
the Don had never heard, and all on account of that one idea which had
flashed across him as he strutted, cigarettiferous, beneath the grateful
shadow of his limes. So crowded is this old globe of ours, and so
interlaced our interests, that one cannot think a new thought without
some poor devil being the better or the worse for it.

Don Diego Salvador was a capitalist, and the abstract thought soon took
the concrete form of a great square plastered building wherein a couple
of hundred of his swarthy countrymen worked with deft nimble fingers at
a rate of pay which no English artisan could have accepted. Within a few
months the result of this new competition was an abrupt fall of prices
in the trade, which was serious for the largest firms and disastrous
for the smaller ones. A few old-established houses held on as they were,
others reduced their establishments and cut down their expenses, while
one or two put up their shutters and confessed themselves beaten. In
this last unfortunate category was the ancient and respected firm of
Fairbairn Brothers of Brisport.

Several causes had led up to this disaster, though Don Diego's debut a