Three generations

ELDORADO 243
and we thought for a time Eldorado was reached, well
aware as we were that its wealth would be shared
by all.
But opportunities once missed are rarely regained.
More changes than the death of my father, and the
assurance that a certain amount of ironstone was there
to be taken from the pit, had come to pass within
the last twenty years. There were no blast-furnaces
within a long distance for what must be a heavy load
of cargo, involving heavy carriage or freight. The
spendthrift, easy-dealing Laird of Elie House (the
show place to which we were wont to take our
visitors), the uncle and successor of "young Sir John,"
was long since ruined and dead. The estate — includ-
ing Elie Harbour on the Firth — had been sold to, of
all people, one of the great iron-masters of Western
Scotland. Naturally he did not desire an increase of
iron not his own put on the market. Quite as
naturally he may have wished to recoup himself for
the sums of money he had spent on the harbour. The
attempted improvements were predicted to be un-
satisfactory. Harbour engineering — the most difficult
of any — seemed likely to baffle the engineers employed.
The currents had not been sufficiently taken into
account, and the drift of sand increasing instead of
diminishing threatened to choke the harbour.
The apportioning of the harbour dues was in the
hands of the new Laird, and they were laid on to such
a forbidding extent that when Robert attempted to
ship the half-calcined ore to the Newcastle-on-Tyne
furnaces, the profit to the leaseholder was next to nil,
so that prospect with its brief bright glamour faded
into the shadow ; the ironstone was left to keep com-
pany with the abandoned coal in that ignis fatuus of