CHAPTER 19.

 

            IN his newly-born enthusiasm of money-making, James Maynard commenced his preparations for his enterprise. These consisted in perfecting his acquaintance with the technical Spanish legal and mining phraseology; in learning the newest methods of assaying and testing ores; and all the details of draining, extracting, crushing, and refining. He was a man who did nothing by halves. He would entrust nothing to other hands, but would qualify himself to do everything that his mission involved beyond mere brute labour. Finding that he had ample time for these varied tasks, inasmuch as a great deal of what he had to learn was to be obtained from books, and could be done on the voyage, he determined to complete his South American notes and offer them to some publisher. This, he considered, would be recreation in the midst of his other labours, for he was still at that age when a man fancies that he finds rest by changing his occupation from one kind of mental work to another; not having yet discovered that the brain will not long consent to be thus cheated of its due supply of repose and fresh blood. Sixteen hours a day of close application for several weeks together had only once as yet begun to tell upon his highly nervous frame. He had got over the effects of that excess on his last voyage to Brazil, and he feared not now to devote the remainder of his time in England to labour equally severe, cave that it involved a good deal of open-air work and exercise.

 

            Ever a student of the abstrusest problems of antiquity, he had been excited by some remains which he had come upon in one of his rides across the Pampas of the Cordilleras, to institute a comparison between them and the monuments of Salisbury Plain. He had made valuable notes respecting the sun-worship of the Incas, as exhibited in the temples they had erected, and which survived the ravages of their Spanish conquerors. He

(p. 98)

had discovered ample indications of the use of the cross among races severed from time immemorial, perhaps for ever, from intercourse with the rest of mankind, – where rode in the nightly sky above them the starry effigy of the symbol revered throughout Christendom. He had reason to believe that he would find a counterpart of these things in the remains of the Druids, and derive therefrom an argument bearing on the original identity of races or of worships. So he determined to take his books and instruments, and sojourn awhile at Salisbury, where he could follow his antiquarian researches in the intervals of his other labours.

 

            His work might lead to substantial profit, and, besides, was not Margaret in Devonshire, and would he not, at Salisbury, be half-way on the road towards her?

 

 

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