"I felt convinced," he said gratefully, "that I should not make my
appeal to you in vain. Tell me, what do you think of doing with the
rest?"
"I am not sure," Mr. Waddington admitted, after a brief pause. "We are
confronted from the beginning with the fact that there isn't a living
soul who would believe our story. If we tried to publish it, people
would only look upon it as an inferior sort of fiction, and declare that
the idea had been used before. I thought of having one of the beans
resolved into its constituents by a scientific physician, but I doubt if
I'd get any one to treat the matter seriously. Of course," he went on,
"if there were any quantity of the beans, so that we could prove the
truth of our statements upon any one who professed to doubt them, we
might be able to put them to some practical use. At present," he
concluded, with a little sigh, "I really can't think of any."
"When one considers," Burton remarked, "the number of people in high
positions who might have discovered these beans and profited by them, it
does rather appear as though they had been wasted upon an auctioneer and
an auctioneer's clerk who have to get their livings."
"I entirely agree with you," Mr.
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