Our cosy inner office
became a little place, and all our business cold and lifeless exploits
beside his glimpses of strange minglings of men, of slayings unavenged
and curious customs, of trade where no writs run, and the dark
treacheries of eastern ports and uncharted channels.
We had neither of us gone abroad except for a few vulgar raids on Paris;
our world was England, are the places of origin of half the raw material
of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the
forest of Arden. But Gordon-Nasmyth made it so real and intimate for us
that afternoon--for me, at any rate--that it seemed like something seen
and forgotten and now again remembered.
And in the end he produced his sample, a little lump of muddy clay
speckled with brownish grains, in a glass bottle wrapped about with lead
and flannel--red flannel it was, I remember--a hue which is, I know,
popularly supposed to double all the mystical efficacies of flannel.
"Don't carry it about on you," said Gordon-Nasmyth. "It makes a sore."
I took the stuff to Thorold, and Thorold had the exquisite agony of
discovering two new elements in what was then a confidential
analysis.
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