292 " MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE ! " 



the paper. Taylor was really a most invaluable man. 

 He had been with Messrs W. H. Smith & Sons so many 

 years that he retired with several thousand pounds to his 

 credit. These he proceeded to get rid of in a brief space 

 of time by taking Her Majesty's Theatre and running 

 The Ticket of Leave Man there with a first-class company. 

 It ran for only about three weeks, and that was the end. 

 Then we got Taylor to manage the paper, and as he knew 

 all the bookstall men and the publishing ropes generally 

 he was able to do immense good, but Colonel Malleson did 

 not understand what all this meant, and with the departure 

 of Taylor there was an almost immediate drop in circula- 

 tion. It is my misfortune, I suppose, that I must either 

 do things in my own way or do no good at all, and a Board 

 of Directors was to me a thing impossible worse than going 

 to school again. The capital of the Company was rapidly 

 vanishing, and I prepared, with the assistance of a firm 

 of paper-makers, to rescue St Stephen's from impending 

 wreck. 



Meanwhile the partly printed sheets part of the business 

 was progressing famously with the subsidy of 20 a week 

 from Mr Charsley, when suddenly, after the eighth week, 

 that payment was stopped. 



It is a strange story, but Mr Charsley had gone quite 

 out of his depth in the matter of investments on the 

 strength of the very large income that had fallen to 

 him as the purchaser of half the reversion in a life estate. 

 He bought Stoke Park and had the big house magnificently 

 got up for a club. Maple's bill alone was 4000, and 

 another 4000 was spent on pictures and decorations. 

 A course was laid out for steeplechasing and trotting, and 

 Lord Charles Ker was to manage it. Captain Percy Smith 

 was manager of the club, and he got it all into most perfect 

 order it was, in fact, an ideal place. Then Mr Charsley 

 launched out and bought another big estate for some 

 180,000, and on the top of all this he found that the tenant 

 of the life estate, half of whose income he regularly drew, 

 refused to have his life insured, and for that reason there 



