Two London Fairies Author:George Robert Sims General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1906 Original Publisher: Greening Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select... more » from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III THE MONEY-LENDER Mr Joseph Henry Jarboy was the proprietor of an establishment which called itself " The Friendly Loan Society." There was no society. It was all Jarboy. The Friendly Loan Society advertised its willingness to advance sums from £5 to £5000 on your note of hand, without security, and every loan was repayable by easy instalments. But when you had parted with the preliminary inquiry fees and wanted some money, you found that the note of hand generally consisted of a bill of sale upon your furniture, and that the Friendly had a very unfriendly way of calculating interest. As Mr Jarboy was constantly engaged in selling up his clients, he had a well-organised staff of brokers' men under his control, and a well-thought-out system of sale by auctionwhich enabled him to sell the furniture and effects of his victims for about a sixth of the value to bidders who were merely bidding on his behalf. Doing an extensive business on these lines, Mr Jarboy had accumulated a nice little fortune, and had invested some of his capital in house property of the poorer class. He liked poor tenants because they were more easily imposed upon, cheated, and robbed than rich ones. In the matter of illegal and excessive distraint Mr Jar- boy had a reputation which caused him to be much admired by men of his own kidney and his system of seizing furniture, selling it at knock-out prices to himself, and sending it to a furniture warehouse which he carried on under another name was held by experts to be absolutely "great." Mr Jarboy was a stout, round-faced, bald- headed, ra...« less