London, and So On: Low Company! 137
schools
and was cheated of my money. Now I was a married man and had to start
life all over again. Well, back to London and into the trade to which I
belonged by early training and natural taste. A hundred pounds was not
much money, but it furnished me an office and bought me a safe. It so
happened that I made, this time, an extremely lucky start and within a
matter of weeks had found my bearings.
To
have been actively engaged over a period of years in the gem trade and
yet never to have met with tourmalines is something not to be proud
of. It was in this period of my life that I dealt for once in
tourmalines, jargoons, marcasite and the other lesser fry of the gem
world. Perhaps if I had stuck to them I should have made more money
out of them than I ever did out of pearls and that noble three,
emeralds, rubies and sapphires.
Tourmalines,
a composition of silica with varying quantities of oxides of magnesium
and aluminium, present such a variety of beautiful colours and shades
that they come as a revelation to the tyro. The crystals are
translucent, take on a good polish and are often of surprising lustre.
The colourless variety is known as achroite and the green as
andalusite, from its occurrence in Andalusian Spain.
Tourmalines
remind me of a little hunchbacked German, a working jeweller in the
West End, who had been persuaded by a patron to start trading in gems
on his own. Despite all the credit this patron gave him, the little man
was soon in deep water, for the pitfalls in the game are many and
various. Instead of telling his benefactor (who was his biggest
creditor) of his troubles, for the man
