Up to this moment Meadows had treated Mr. Clinton with a marked deference, as from yeoman to gentleman.  The latter, therefore, was not a little surprised when the other turned sharp on him thus: 

“This won’t do; we must understand one another.  You think you are the man of talent and I am the clodhopper.  Think so to-morrow night; but for the next twenty-four hours you must keep that notion out of your head or you will bitch my schemes and lose your fifty pounds.  Look here, sir.  You began life with ten thousand pounds; you have been all your life trying all you know to double it—­and where is it?  The pounds are pence and the pence on the road to farthings.  I started with a whip and a smock-frock, and this,” touching his head, “and I have fifty thousand pounds in government securities.  Which is the able man of these two—­the bankrupt that talks like an angel and loses the game, or the wise man that quietly wins it and pockets what all the earth are grappling with him for?  So much for that.  And now which is master, the one who pays or the one who is paid?  I am not a liberal man, sir; I am a man that looks at every penny.  I don’t give fifty pounds.  I sell it.  That fifty pounds is the price of your vanity for twenty-four hours.  I take a day’s loan of it.  You are paid fifty pounds per diem to see that there is more brains in my little finger than in all your carcass.  See it for twenty-four hours or I won’t fork out, or don’t see it but obey me as if you did see it.  You shan’t utter a syllable or move an inch that I have not set down for you.  Is this too hard? then accept ten pounds for to-day’s work, and let us part before you bungle your master’s game as you have done your own.”

Mr. Clinton was red with mortified vanity, but forty pounds!  He threw himself back in his chair.

“This is amusing,” said he.  “Well, sir, I will act as if you were Solomon and I nobody.  Of course under these circumstances no responsibility rests with me.”

“You are wasting my time with your silly prattle,” said Meadows, very sternly.  “Man alive! you never made fifty pounds cash since you were calved.  It comes to your hand to-day, and even then you must chatter and jaw instead of saying yes and closing your fingers on it like a vise.”

“Yes!” shouted Clinton; “there.”

“Take that quire,” said Meadows, sharply.  “Now I’ll dictate the very words you are to say; learn them off by heart and don’t add a syllable or subtract one or—­no fifty pounds.”

Meadows being a general by nature (not Horse-Guards) gave Clinton instructions down to the minutest matters of detail, and he whose life had been spent in proving he would succeed—­and failing—­began to suspect the man who had always succeeded might perhaps have had something to do with his success.

Next morning, well primed by Meadows, Mr. Clinton presented himself to Messrs. Brathwaite & Stevens and requested a private audience.  He inquired whether they were disposed to allow him a commission if he would introduce them to an Australian settler on whose land gold had been discovered.