We won't disturb him." The president was always proud to find a professor busy; it looked well.
But if Dr.Boomer had known what was going on behind the oaken door of the Department of Geology and Metallurgy, he would have felt considerably disturbed himself.
For here again Gildas, senior professor of geology, was working among his blue flames at a final test on which depended the fate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated and all connected with it.
Before him there were some twenty or thirty packets of crumpled dust and splintered ore that glittered on the testing-table.

It had been taken up from the creek along its whole length, at even spaces twenty yards apart, by an expert sent down in haste by the directorate, after Gildas's second report, and heavily bribed to keep his mouth shut.
And as Professor Gildas stood and worked at the samples and tied them up after analysis in little white cardboard boxes, he marked each one very carefully and neatly with the words, PYRITES: WORTHLESS.
Beside the professor worked a young demonstrator of last year's graduation class.

It was he, in fact, who had written the polite notice on the card.
"What is the stuff, anyway ?" he asked.
"A sulphuret of iron," said the professor, "or iron pyrites.

In colour and appearance it is practically identical with gold.

Indeed, in all ages," he went on, dropping at once into the classroom tone and adopting the professional habit of jumping backwards twenty centuries in order to explain anything properly, "it has been readily mistaken for the precious metal.