Mr Fisker laughed at him.

The object of Fisker, Montague, and Montague was not to make a railway to Vera Cruz, but to float a company.

Paul thought that Mr Fisker seemed to be indifferent whether the railway should ever be constructed or not.

It was clearly his idea that fortunes were to be made out of the concern before a spadeful of earth had been moved.

If brilliantly printed programmes might avail anything, with gorgeous maps, and beautiful little pictures of trains running into tunnels beneath snowy mountains and coming out of them on the margin of sunlit lakes, Mr Fisker had certainly done much.