Marcus and Matthew laughed, but Fayette Overtop, who absolutely revelled in paradoxes, said, “True, Tiffles, true!”

“Don’t think,” pursued Tiffles, “that I expected to impose on you with it.  You know that I am a poor devil, living on my wits.” (Tiffles was delightfully frank with his intimate acquaintances.) “I hold out this glittering bait, not for my friends, but for my old foe and natural enemy, the world.  You must know that I am on the eve of a grand speculation—­probably the grandest I have ever undertaken.”

“Another plan of advertising with large kites by day, and pictorial lanterns attached to their tails at night?” asked Marcus Wilkeson.

“Or another Submarine Pneumatic Parcel-Delivering Tube to Brooklyn?” asked Matthew Maltboy.

“Or an Association for the Cultivation of Mushrooms in Dark Cellars?” asked Fayette Overtop.

“Capital hits!” replied Wesley Tiffles, who took an unfeigned delight in a friendly allusion to his failures.  “But allow me to inform you definitely, that those unfortunate speculations are not to be revived.  Like the lightning, I don’t strike twice in the same place.  No; the project upon which I am now engaged is one so eminently practical, so free from all that is visionary, that you will wonder how I thought of it.  That project is a PANORAMA OF AFRICA!”

CHAPTER V.

THE PANORAMA OF AFRICA

The three bachelors concurred in the opinion that the idea was a good one; but Marcus Wilkeson suggested that the field was too large.

“I thought you would like the general proposition,” said Tiffles.  “But, bless you, Mark!  I don’t mean to paint the whole continent, from stem to stern, so to speak; only the undiscovered part of Central Africa—­say from Cape Guardafui on the east to the Bight of Benin on the west.”

“But how the deuce,” asked Matthew Maltboy, “are you, or anybody else, going to paint what has not been discovered?”

Tiffles could hardly suppress a smile at the simplicity of the question.  “Why,” said he, “that’s easy enough.  Don’t all the geographers tell us that the interior of Africa is made up, so far as known, of alternate deserts and jungles, like the patches on a coverlet?  Very well.  I conform to this general principle of the continent.  I put half of the canvas in desert, and the rest in jungle, and I can’t be far out of the way.  Take the idea?”

“Perfectly,” said Matthew Maltboy; “but if you have nothing but alternate, deserts and jungles, it strikes me your panorama will be a little monotonous.  Perhaps I am wrong.” (Maltboy always offered suggestions timidly.)

“I have thought of that, and guarded against it.  I shall fill the jungles with animated life—­elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giraffes, zebras, crocodiles, boa constrictors, and other specimens of natural history indigenous to that delightful region.”