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I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn streets of black, burned-out and desolate London:  for its bank-vaults, etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris, and then lying in the Speranza at Dover; nor had I sufficient familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the aid of Bottins, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now catalogued.  My ship was the Speranza, which brought me from Havre, for at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all purposes, the Speranza being an American yacht, very palatially fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000 tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables me to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days’ work at the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit.  I threw out her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on the quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and the half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London:  meaning to make Dover my depot, and the London rails my thoroughfare from all parts of the country.

Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine:  a harrowing slavery.  I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals:  for the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake.  However, all’s well that ends well, though if I had it to go through again, certainly I should not.  The Speranza is now lying seven miles off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th of June at 10 in the night:  no wind, no moon:  cabin full of mist:  and I pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace.  When the thirty-three ...

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Those words:  ‘when the thirty-three’ were written by me over seventeen years since—­long years—­seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to what they refer.  The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of the Speranza, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour’s aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.