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 mines that produced fabulous riches, and runs where the sheep were innumerable.

Graves was purposely vague as to the exact location of his uncle's sheep-stations, and on one occasion he spent an unhappy evening undergoing cross-examination by an Australian Rhodes scholar. However, he persisted in his story, and Australia was a long way off, and it was very unlikely that anyone would be sufficiently interested to unearth and identify all its millionaires in order to prove that Josiah Williams and his millions existed only in the imagination of his alleged nephew.

Graves was a thin, pale-faced young man with nondescript features and an incipient moustache. Furthermore, he had what is known as a narrow dental arch, which gave to his face a peevish expression. When he smiled he bared two large front teeth that made him resemble a rabbit. His hair was as colourless as his personality. He was entirely devoid of imagination, or, as Tom Little phrased it, "What he lacked in divine fire, he made up for in damned cheek."

He led a solitary life. When his fellow undergraduates deigned to call upon him it was invariably for the purpose of a "rag."

Trade was the iron that had entered his soul; he could never forget that his father was a grocer and provision merchant in a midland town. His one stroke of good luck, that is as he regarded it, was that no one at St. Joseph's was aware of the