Meadows turned cold as death in reading it.  At the part where Farmer Meadows was referred to as the first link in the golden chain, he dashed it to the ground and raised his foot to trample on it, but forbore lest he should dirty a thing that must go to Susan.

Then he walked the room in great agitation.

“Too late, George Fielding,” he cried aloud—­“too late; I can’t shift my heart like a weathercock to suit the changes in your luck.  You have been feeding me with hopes till I can’t live without them.  I never longed for a thing yet but what I got it, and I’ll have this though I trample a hundred George Fieldings dead on my way to it.  Now let me think.”

He pondered deeply, his great brows knitted and lowered.  For full half an hour invention and resource poured scheme after scheme through that teeming brain, and prudence and knowledge of the world sat in severe and cool judgment on each in turn, and dismissed the visionary ones.  At last the deep brow began to relax, and the eye to kindle; and when he rose to ring the bell his face was a sign-post with Eureka written on it in Nature’s vivid handwriting.  In that hour he had hatched a plot worthy of Machiavel—–­a plot complex yet clear.  A servant-girl answered the bell.

“Tell David to saddle Rachel directly.”

And in five minutes Mr. Meadows, with a shirt, a razor, a comb, and a map of Australia, was galloping by cross lanes to the nearest railway station.  There he telegraphed Mr. Clinton to meet him at Peel’s Coffee-House at two o’clock.  The message flashed up to town like lightning.  The man followed it slowly like the wind.

CHAPTER LV.

MEADOWS found Mr. Clinton at Peel’s.  “Mr. Clinton, I want a man of intelligence to be at my service for twenty-four hours.  I give you the first offer.”

Mr. Clinton replied that really he had so many irons in the fire that twenty-four hours—­

Meadows put a fifty-pound note on the table.

“Will all your irons iron you out fifty pounds as flat as that?”

“Why, hem?”

“No, nor five.  Come, sir, sharp is the word.  Can you be my servant for twenty-four hours for fifty pounds? yes or no!”

“Why, this is dramatic—­yes!”

“It is half-past two.  Between this and four o’clock I must buy a few hundred acres in Australia, a fair bargain.”

“Humph!  Well, that can be done.  I know an old fellow that has land in every part of the globe.”

“Take me to him.”

In ten minutes they were in one of those dingy, narrow alleys in the city of London, that look the abode of decent poverty, and they could afford to buy Grosvenor Square for their stables; and Mr. Clinton introduced his friend to a blear-eyed merchant in a large room papered with maps; the windows were incrusted; mustard and cress might have been grown from them.  Beauty in clean linen collar and wristbands would have shown