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at London, Ralph left his brothers to dispose of the cargo. When the Company's agent came on board to inspect the cargo Ralph opened one of his boxes and showed the agent the glittering earth. The Company had received some such earth before from which the most skillful metallurgists they could find had failed to extract a grain of precious metal; therefore, when Ralph offered the agent a sovereign as the Company's probable two and one half per cent profit on the contents of the six boxes, the latter took the coin with a smile of pity for the deluded young man.

Ralph hired a house in London and had a furnace built in it, in which to melt the gold, with crucibles capable of containing each two hundred pounds avoirdupois, and cranes with which one man could handle a crucible. He procured some moulds of a size to run bars of about seven hundred troy ounces each. On the bottoms of the molds were engraved the