landing-stages of the steamers for the Isle of Man and Anglesey.  Nothing surprised Denry so much as the vogue of the Chocolate Remedy.  It was a serious anxiety to him, and he muddled both the manufacture and distribution of the remedy, from simple ignorance and inexperience.  His chief difficulty at first had been to obtain small cakes of chocolate that were not stamped with the maker’s name or mark.  Chocolate manufacturers seemed to have a passion for imprinting their Quakerly names on every bit of stuff they sold.  Having at length obtained a supply, he was silly enough to spend time in preparing the remedy himself in his bedroom!  He might as well have tried to feed the British Army from his mother’s kitchen.  At length he went to a confectioner in Rhyl and a greengrocer in Llandudno, and by giving away half the secret to each, he contrived to keep the whole secret to himself.  But even then he was manifestly unequal to the situation created by the demand for the Chocolate Remedy.  It was a situation that needed the close attention of half a dozen men of business.  It was quite different from the affair of the lifeboat.

One night a man who had been staying a day or two in the boarding-house in St Asaph’s Road said to Denry: 

“Look here, mister.  I go straight to the point.  What’ll you take?”

And he explained what he meant.  What would Denry take for the entire secret and rights of the Chocolate Remedy and the use of the name “Machin” ("without which none was genuine").

“What do you offer?” Denry asked.

“Well, I’ll give you a hundred pounds down, and that’s my last word.”

Denry was staggered.  A hundred pounds for simply nothing at all—­for dipping bits of chocolate in lemon-juice!

He shook his head.

“I’ll take two hundred,” he replied.

And he got two hundred.  It was probably the worst bargain that he ever made in his life.  For the Chocolate Remedy continued obstinately in demand for ten years afterwards.  But he was glad to be rid of the thing; it was spoiling his sleep and wearing him out.

He had other worries.  The boatmen of Llandudno regarded him as an enemy of the human race.  If they had not been nature’s gentlemen they would have burned him alive at a stake.  Cregeen, in particular, consistently referred to him in terms which could not have been more severe had Denry been the assassin of Cregeen’s wife and seven children.  In daring to make over a hundred pounds a week out of a ramshackle old lifeboat that Cregeen had sold to him for thirty-five pounds, Denry was outraging Cregeen’s moral code.  Cregeen had paid thirty-five pounds for the Fleetwinz, a craft immeasurably superior to Denry’s nameless tub.  And was Cregeen making a hundred pounds a week out of it?  Not a hundred shillings!  Cregeen genuinely thought that he had a right to half Denry’s profits.  Old Simeon, too, seemed to think that he had