profits
of the railway, or to the benefit which such means of communication
would confer upon the world at large; but applied solely to the
appetite for such stock as theirs, which might certainly be produced
in the speculating world by a proper manipulation of the affairs.

'You seem to think you couldn't get it taken up in your own country,'
said Melmotte.

'There's not a doubt about getting it all taken up there. Our folk,
sir, are quick enough at the game; but you don't want them to teach
you, Mr Melmotte, that nothing encourages this kind of thing like
competition. When they hear at St. Louis and Chicago that the thing is
alive in London, they'll be alive there. And it's the same here, sir.
When they know that the stock is running like wildfire in America,
they'll make it run here too.'

'How far have you got?'

'What we've gone to work upon is a concession for making the line
from the United States Congress. We're to have the land for nothing,
of course, and a grant of one thousand acres round every station, the
stations to be twenty-five miles apart.'

'And the land is to be made over to you,--when?'

'When we have made the line up to the station.' Fisker understood
perfectly that Mr Melmotte did not ask the question in reference to
any value that he might attach to the possession of such lands, but to
the attractiveness of such a prospectus in the eyes of the outside
world of speculators.

'And what do you want me to do, Mr Fisker?'

'I want to have your name there,' he said. And he placed his finger
down on a spot on which it was indicated that there was, or was to be,
a chairman of an English Board of Directors, but with a space for the
name hitherto blank.

'Who are to be your directors here, Mr Fisker?'

'We should ask you to choose them, sir. Mr Paul Montague should be
one, and perhaps his friend Sir Felix Carbury might be another. We
could get probably one of the Directors of the City and West End. But
we would leave it all to you,--as also the amount of stock you would
like to take yourself. If you gave yourself to it, heart and soul, Mr
Melmotte, it would be the finest thing that there has been out for a
long time. There would be such a mass of stock!'

'You have to back that with a certain amount of paid-up capital?'

'We take care, sir, in the West not to cripple commerce too closely by
old-fashioned bandages. Look at what we've done already, sir, by
having our limbs pretty free. Look