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This desire (since
the thing was iniquitous) seemed quite natural to the boy, though why
the affair was iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing
wisdom, he managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the
fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and ghouls,
which had lent to his father's correspondence the flavour of a gruesome
Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth attained to as
close an intimacy with the San Tome mine as the old man who wrote these
plaintive and enraged letters on the other side of the sea. He had been
made several times already to pay heavy fines for neglecting to work the
mine, he reported, besides other sums extracted from him on account
of future royalties, on the ground that a man with such a valuable
concession in his pocket could not refuse his financial assistance to
the Government of the Republic. The last of his fortune was passing away
from him against worthless receipts, he wrote, in a rage, whilst he was
being pointed out as an individual who had known how to secure enormous
advantages from the necessities of his country. And the young man in
Europe grew more and more interested in that thing which could provoke
such a tumult of words and passion.

He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without bitterness. It
might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor dad, and the
whole story threw a queer light upon the social and political life of
Costaguana. The view he took of it was sympathetic to his father, yet
calm and reflective. His personal feelings had not been outraged, and it
is difficult to resent with proper and durable indignation the physical
or mental anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is
one's own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his
turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tome mine. But it was another
form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into whose magic
formula there entered hope, vigour, and self-confidence, instead of
weary indignation and despair. Left after he was twenty to his own
guidance (except for the severe injunction not to return to Costaguana),
he had pursued his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of
qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his
labours remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal
point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He
visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons.
He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings
had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like
the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They
might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect
this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost

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