It was a good-sized house, and he meant to put in a steady couple to keep it, giving up two upper rooms to make a laboratory for Mr. Yolland, whose soul was much set on experiments for which his lodgings gave him no space; but the very day when Harold opened his coffee-rooms, as he went down the street, an “Original Dragon’s Head” and a “Genuine Dragon’s Head” grinned defiance at him, in the full glory of teeth, fiery breath, and gilded scales, on the other side of the way.  I believe they had been beershops before; but, be that as it may, they devoured quite as many as their predecessor, and though newspapers and draught-boards lay all about the place, they attracted only two clients!

And the intended closing of all the beer-houses on the Arghouse property, except the time-honoured “Blue Boar” on the village green, seemed likely to have the same effect; for the notices to their holders, grimly resisted by Bullock, seemed only to cause dozens of householders to represent the absolute need of such houses whenever they did not belong to us.

“To destroy one is to produce two,” sighed Harold.

“There’s nothing to be done but to strike at the root,” I said.

“What’s that?” said Harold.

“Man’s evil propensities,” I said.

“Humph,” said Harold.  “If I could manage the works now!  They say the shares are to be had for an old song.”

“Oh, Harry, don’t have anything to do with them,” I entreated.  “They have ruined every creature who has meddled with them, and done unmitigated mischief.”

Harold made no answer, but the next day he was greatly stimulated by a letter from Prometesky, part of which he read to me, in its perfect English, yet foreign idiom.

“I long to hear of the field of combat we had to quit, because one party was too stolid, the other too ardent.  I see it all before me with the two new champions freshly girded for the strife, but a peaceful strife, my friend.  Let our experience be at least profitable to you, and let it be a peaceful contention of emulation such as is alone suited to that insular nation which finds its strongest stimulus in domestic comfort and wealth.  Apropos, has some one pursued a small discovery of mine, that, had I not been a stranger of a proscribed nation, and had not your English earl and the esquires been hostile to all save the hereditary plough, might have found employment for thousands and prevented the history of your fathers and of myself?  That bed of argillaceous deposit around the course of your Lerne, which I found to be of the same quality as the porcelain clay of Meissen, does it still merely bear a few scanty blades of corn, or is its value appreciated, and is it occupying hundreds of those who starved and were discontented, to the great surprise of their respectable landlords?  I wonder whether a few little figures that I modelled in the clay for specimens, and baked in my hostess’s oven, are still in existence.  The forms of clay were there.  Alas!  I asked in vain of your English magnates for the fire from heaven to animate the earth, or rather I would have brought it, and I suffered.”