Read Ebook: Recollections With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of Original Letters of which one by George Meredith and another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in facsimile by Murray David Christie

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I do not propose to make any immediate flight into sentiment. The thing for which I am trying is a genuine recollection of the way in which the growth of this emotion was marked within myself. Things are very much otherwise to-day; but nearly three-score years ago there was a certain purposed austerity practised by the most dutiful and praiseworthy parents, which froze the natural budding affections of a child. Before I had arrived at the technical age of manhood, my father had become the dearest friend I had in the world, and the friendship lasted till his death; but as a child I feared him. He was by nature as kindly a man as ever lived; but he had been bred in the old rigid Calvinistic creed of Scotland, and though I knew very well, in later years, how his heart had rebelled against him, he was, throughout my childhood and early youth, the embodiment of justice, certainly, so far as he could see it, but always of an apparently unpitying severity. Any judgment of his character based on the system of discipline in which he devoutly believed would have been false in the extreme, for the infliction of pain was actually abhorrent to him. I remember how, on scores of occasions, when I put him to the ordeal of administering a hiding to myself, his face would grow pale, and his hand would tremble.

Between my mother and myself there were none of those intimacies of affection which make life so happy to a child. The whole atmosphere of the house repelled love, and its whole principle seemed to be embodied in the belief that a child should think despitefully of himself, and should repress all natural ebullitions of fondness or of gaiety. I have been trying hard to recall the surname of the boy to whom my heart first flowed out in a real affection, but memory fails me. He was a schoolfellow of mine, and I guess that he may have been of Scottish parentage, because his Christian name was Gavin. I can give no reason, at this time of day--nor ever in my maturer years have I been able to find a reason--why I should have loved that small contemporary as I did. I cannot say that he was conspicuously gifted in any way. He was certainly no Steerforth to my Copperfield, being neither distinguished for good looks, nor for brilliance at his schoolwork, nor for success in games.

It was at this time that there was an ebb in the family fortunes, and I was hastily taken away from a respectable private school in the High Street, and sent, as I have explained, to a big vulgar establishment a mile away, where a crowd of some three hundred lads attended, at a cost to their parents of threepence a week per head. I did not stay there long, but whilst I was kept there, by the strain on the family exchequer, I was very unhappy. It was in the midst of a sore-hearted loneliness that I encountered Gavin, who, to the best of my belief, was the son of a bargee who worked on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. The impulse which took me towards him I have always regarded as one of the strangest, as it was undoubtedly one of the strongest, I have known. He and I were pretty much alike in age--somewhere between nine and ten we must have been--and we seemed to slide together like two separate rainspots which meet upon a window-pane in wet weather. We used to wander about the stony playground, from which every blade of grass was trampled, except in the remoter corners, and to walk with our arms about each other's shoulders, and to exchange almost daily such trumpery schoolboy treasures as we owned. I never had a child sweetheart, and I never knew anybody with whom I exchanged a caress, or bartered a word of real kindness, until I fell in with this fascinating young ragamuffin. I never spoke about him to a soul, but he filled my thoughts night and day, and I was never happy out of his society. I am guilty of no exaggeration when I say that. The feeling I had towards him was, in its own time, so tender, so yearning, so complete in its absorption of my whole nature, that it stands altogether apart in my experience. And when, after a period of some six months, perhaps, the family fortunes revived a little, and I was restored once more to the society of my own social equals, I was broken-hearted at the thought of losing him.

The master of this rough school had a glimmering of the necessity for technical education, and on occasional afternoons a chosen number of us were drafted off into a big class-room to watch some craftsman working at his trade. One of these men set the whole class on fire with a spirit of emulation. He brought with him a number of medallions, a quantity of plaster-of-paris, a stick or two of common sulphur, and a small brazier, and he proceeded to show us how plaster casts were taken from his medallions. The first part of the process was to oil the surface of the medal, and to bind a strip of brown paper about its edge, so as to form a shallow little well. The next business was to melt enough of the sulphur to secure a cast of the medallion. This part of the process resulted in the production of a most appalling smell, which was not lessened in pungency when the odour of singed brown paper was added to that of melting sulphur. When the cast was cool it also was bound round with brown paper, and a compound of plaster-of-paris and water was poured over it When this had hardened, behold! a snowy reproduction of the original medallion. We all went quite wild about this process, and when the workman filled in the hollowed head in the mould--it was a portrait of John Wesley--with the white preparation, very carefully, by the aid of a small spoon and a camel-hair pencil, we watched with wonder for the next development. The craftsman took a small quantity of chrome-yellow, and, having mixed it carefully with his creamy paste, poured it over the white stuff, so that in a few minutes we saw a snowy bas-relief of the great divine set on a golden-coloured background. From then until I left the school there was an actual fever for the making of plaster medallions, mainly from the heavy, half-effaced Bolton pennies which at that time were in circulation; and among those who were most devoted to this pursuit were my friend Gavin and myself.

I worked in the ramshackle, bankrupt, old printing office at home until I was nearly eighteen years of age, and it was then decided to send me to London to complete my education in the business.

It is like an exhibition of the biograph, in which the scenes depicted go by at such a racing speed that it is difficult for the eye to follow them. There is an instantaneous vision of the old kitchen, seen at some abnormal unaccustomed hour of early morning in the winter-time. Three o'clock on the morning of January 3, 1865. A gas-lit scene of bustle and hurry. Gone. A minute's waiting in a snow-powdered road, carpet-bag in hand, and four-horsed coach ramping along with a frosty gleam of lamps. A jingle of harness, and an adventurous tooting from the guard's horn, as if a charge was being sounded. Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of echoes and voices. Gone.

A buffet at Oxford, and an instantaneous glimpse of people scalding their throats with an intolerable decoction called coffee extract. The figure of an imperious guard with a waving lamp. The vision of a stampede. Gone. Then an interlude of sleep, during which an orchestra plays dream music, with a roll, roll, roll of wheels as a musical groundwork to the theme. Then Paddington, in a fog--a real London particular, now for the first time seen, felt, tasted, sneezed at, coughed at, wept over. Distracted biographic figures rampant everywhere. Gone. A vision of streets, populous, and full of movement, but half-invisible in a pea-soup haze, through which the gas that takes the place of daylight most ineffectually glimmers. Gone. Then a room, still gas-lit when it should be broad day; a table spread with napery none too clean; a landlady in a dressing-gown and curl-papers; and breakfast. The biograph ceases to whirl by at its original speed, and I can take breath here, and can begin to analyse myself and my own surroundings.

To begin with, this is London; and to continue, I don't think much of it. This is a London egg, and this is London bacon, and this exiguous liquid which "laves the milk-jug with celestial blue" is London milk. All the flavours are strange. The atmosphere is strange. The sight of a lady in curlpapers at 10 a.m. is strange.

Now, in setting down all these things, I begin to take new notice of a fact which has long been familiar to me. It has been expressed by more than one poet, and the reason for it may be found in the works of more than one man of science; but the fact itself is that every one of these cinemato-graphical exercises is associated with a special odour. These special odours have each one so often recurred that they have driven home certain memories in such wise as to make them stick. The fire in the old home kitchen had been "raked" as we used to say in South Staffordshire, overnight, and it gave forth a scent of smouldering ash which, whenever and wherever I have encountered it, has not failed to bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid, faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog, or the fragrance of a London egg--any one of which will infallibly take me back to the scene and the time at which it was first perceived.

I never exchanged a word with Dickens in my life; but at this period, by some extraordinary chance, I met him twice. I knew his personal aspect well, for I had heard him read his own works in Birmingham. I was, indeed, a unit in the packed audience which greeted his very first professional appearance as a platform exponent of his own pages. That event took place at the old Broad Street Music Hall in Birmingham, a building which was superseded by the Prince of Wales' Theatre. It was not easy to mistake so characteristic a figure for that of any other man living.

There used to be in Cheapside, at the time of which I write, a window in which the Stereoscopic Company exhibited the latest achievements in photography; and it was my custom, in the dinner hour, to spend some odd minutes in front of this display. I was impressed one day by a new life-sized portrait of Dickens, an enlargement by a process then quite novel. The hair and beard, I remember, had a look of being made out of telegraph wire; but the features were quite natural and unexaggerated. I had taken a good look at the picture, and had, indeed, so firmly fixed it in my mind that I can positively see it now, and could, if I were artist enough, reproduce it; when, having an unoccupied quarter of an hour still on my hands, I turned to stroll towards St Paul's Churchyard, and there, at my elbow, stood the original of the picture. He was looking at it with his head a little thrown back, and somewhat set on one side, and his look was very keen and critical. I gave a start which attracted his attention, and, in the extremity of my surprise, I am afraid that I stared at him rather rudely. I looked back at the photograph, and I looked back at the living face of the great master of tears and laughter, who was then my reigning deity. I can only suppose that my face was full of a foolish wonder and worship, for when I had looked from Dickens to the portrait again, and then back to Dickens, the great man laughed, and gave me a little comic affirmative nod, as much as to say: "It is so, my young friend." With that he turned briskly, and walked away along Cheapside, leaving me wonder-stricken at what was not, perhaps, so very wonderful an adventure after all.

I rubbed shoulders with the great man again, within a month or two, on a coach which travelled from Thame to Oxford. I climbed that coach on purpose to enjoy the privilege of sitting next to him. He had a travelling companion, who was nursing between his knees quite a little stack of walking-sticks and umbrellas, and I overheard a brief colloquy between him and Dickens.

"Charles," said the man with the bundle, "why don't you have your name engraved on these?"

"Good God!" said Dickens, in a tone of almost querulous indignation. "Isn't it bad enough already?"

One can well believe that the poor great man found it hard to get about England without being stared at, and pointed out and run after; and we know, from his own pen, that outside his public hours he had a self-respecting passion for privacy.

"And my elder brother leaned upon his sword, Mr Boffin, And wiped away a tear, Sir."

I think that first and last I heard Charles Dickens in everything he read in public. What an amazing artist he was in this direction can be realised only by those who heard him. A great actor is always a legend. In these days he may leave something behind him by means of the phonograph and science may yet contrive such an exhibition of facial display and gesture as will enable those who come after us to appreciate his greatness, but in a few years at the utmost, the last man who sat spellbound under the magic of the Dickens personality will have vanished from the face of the earth and nothing but a record will be left.

I am afraid that like most newly emancipated lads I used my freedom in many foolish ways; but most of them were harmless, and some of my truancies from work were even useful to me. Do what I would, I could not find the strength of will to go and pick up types in a frowsy printing office when the picture-gazing fit was on me; and many a time I shirked my duties for the vicious pleasure of a long day's intercourse with Turner in the National Gallery, or for a lingering stroll amongst the marbles at the Museum. One never-to-be forgotten day, my old name-father, David Christie, lent me a reader's ticket, and I found myself for the first time in that central citadel of books, the Museum Library. I went in gaily, with a heart full of ardour; but as I looked about me my spirits fell to zero. I knew that what I saw in the storied shelves which run round the walls, under the big glass dome, made but a little part of the vast collection stored away below and around them; and the impossibility of making even a surface acquaintance with that which lay in sight came strongly home to me.

I Enlist--St George's Barracks--The Recruits--From Bristol to Cork--Sergeants--The Bounty and the Free Kit--Life in the Army--My Discharge--A Sweet Revenge.

I am not very good at dates, but there are a few which I can recall with unfailing accuracy. On 25th May 1865, whilst I was staring at one of the sunlit fountains in Trafalgar Square, and listening to the bells of Westminster as they chimed the hour of four, a venerable old spider in a blue uniform with brass buttons, and a triple chevron of gold lace upon his arm, accosted me without introduction and asked me what I thought about life in the Army. Until then, so far as I can remember, I had never thought about the Army at all. My eighteenth birthday was just one month and twelve days behind me; I had one and sevenpence in the wide world; I was smoking the last cigar of an expensive box, in the purchase of which I had not been justified by the means at my disposal; and I was in mortal terror of my landlady. It had been discovered at the printing office of Messrs Unwin Bros., at which I had been engaged as an "improver," that I had no regular indentures, and I had been thrown upon a merely casual employment amongst as undesirable and as hopeless a set as could have been found at that time in my trade in London. Apart from all these considerations, the world had come to an end because a certain young lady, who, to the best of my belief, is still alive, and a prosperous and happy grandmother, had unequivocally declined to marry me. The blue-clad spider had no need to spread the web of temptation. I resolved in an instant, and he and I adjourned to a backyard somewhere in the neighbourhood, for which I have long since sought in vain. I rather fancy that the wide spaces of Northumberland Avenue have displaced it; but, in any case, the route we took led us towards the river, the smell of which comes back to my nostrils at the moment at which I write, with a queer mingled suggestion of sludge, and sunlight, and sewage.

I got home that night without any interview with the dreaded landlady, and made a bolt very early in the morning, leaving books, pictures, and wardrobe to solve my bill. That night I slept in the great London depot barracks. I know perhaps as well as anybody how Tommy Atkins has improved in character and conduct since those days, but I can aver that never before or since have I encountered a crew so wholly shameless and abominable as I found that night at St George's, Westminster. It is not a pretty thing to be the only decently bred and sober man amongst a howling crowd of yokel drunkards, whose every phrase is built on a foundation of hitherto unconceived obscenities. The night was enough; and, with three half-crowns in my pocket, paid to me as subsistence money for the three days ensuing between that date and the date of my departure, I betook myself to a common lodging-house, and lived in comparative decency. Some score of us, or perhaps a dozen, went up together for surgical examination, and were made to strip stark naked in each other's presence. I had never objected to this amongst my own kind and kindred, when one exposed one's nudity by the side of the clean brook or yellow canal in which we used to bathe in boyhood; but amongst this crew it was hard, and even terrible. We had all been bathed, perforce, before the medical examination began; but a mere tubbing does not cleanse the mind or tongue, and I loathed alike the ceremony itself and the men amongst whom I was forced to submit to it.

The drunken, howling, cursing, foolish contingent with which I started were scattered far and wide from the Catshill Barracks at Cork, and I travelled thence under the care of a sedate old sergeant to Cahir, in Tipperary. The sergeant was talkative and friendly, but I paid little heed to him, for it was here, if I mistake not, that the joy of landscape first entered into my soul. I have an impression only of an abounding green and blue in general, but one or two stopping-points are as clear in my mind as if I had seen them yesterday. Amongst them is some old grey stone bridge near Limerick, where the train slowed down and my Irish companion--Limerick born and bred, and rejoicing to show his own country to a landscape lover--declared that he had travelled almost dry-shod over the backs of the salmon which once thronged along that river. I had my doubts at the moment as to the literal truth of this statement, and I am not quite sure that I do not nurse them still. Anyhow, the country struck me with that deceptive sense of fruitfulness which besets every Englishman on his first travels into the fertile districts of Ireland; and partly, perhaps, because I was half a Celt to begin with, the "wearing of the green" became then and there a symbol in my mind.

Finally, at the end of a fairly long day's run--for the cheaper kind of train travelled slowly in those days--the convoying sergeant and I were dumped down at the station at Cahir, which had not yet become celebrated in that gorgeous fiction which was woven about it in later years by the claimant to the Tichborne estates. Night was falling as we tramped through the village, and on the road beyond we came across the ghostly shell of an old castle, standing, I think, in the Byrne demesne, which was packed full of jackdaws, who had caught one or two human phrases from some half-Christianised member of their fellowship, and who woke the echoes in answer to our footsteps with a hundred semi-human cries. They had only a phrase or two amongst them, but they gave one clearly the impression that they represented a Babylonian crowd intent on insurrection.

I was passed from one sergeant to another in the course of my transfer from St George's Barracks to Clare in the county Tipperary, and there was not one of them who did not try to induce me to change a reputable garb for a set of garments that would have done justice to a scare-crow.

The contingent with which I was shipped from Bristol to Cork composed as ribald and foul-mouthed a crew as I remember to have seen, and long before I assumed Her Majesty's uniform, I was sickened of the enterprise on which I had embarked. I think I am justified in saying that I was instrumental in bringing about one great and much needed reform. In those days, the recruit on enlistment was supposed to receive a bounty and a free kit; as the thing was worked out by the regimental quartermaster, he never saw one or the other. He had served out to him on his arrival at his depot a set of obsolete garments which he was forbidden to wear and was compelled to return to stores, when a new outfit at his own cost had been supplied to him. My gorge rose at this bare-faced iniquity, and as a protest against it, I attired myself on my first Sunday in barracks in the clothes which had been fraudulently assigned to me, and joined the regiment on church parade. I suppose no soldier had been so attired since Waterloo, and my appearance was the signal for a roar of laughter in which men and officers alike joined, and which was not extinguished until I had been ignominiously hustled back to quarters. In the Fourth Royal Irish Dragoon Guards at least, I know myself to have been the last man whom the wicked system attempted to pillage in that fashion. As a matter of course, I was marked from that moment.

People who have a practical knowledge of modern Army life tell me that things have changed altogether for the better since those far bygone days of 1865; and I am disposed to believe that no such shameless swindles as were then perpetrated could possibly continue for a week under existing conditions. A Press which makes us familiar with all sorts of grievances, and an inquiring Parliamentarian or two, would provide a short shrift and a long rope for the perpetrator of any such bare-faced robbery as I suffered under when I first joined the Fourth Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. The motive of my enlistment had no remotest connection with the bounty offered. I joined the Army simply out of that green-sickness of the mind from which so many young men suffer, and some nebulous notions of heroism in falling against a savage foe in some place not geographically defined. But in the printed terms of the agreement which I signed it was promised that I should receive a three pound bounty and a free kit. As a matter of fact, I received neither one nor the other. I was served out, as I have stated, with an absolutely obsolete uniform, which I was forbidden to wear, and my bounty was impounded to pay for regulation clothing.

This initial struggle made me from the first a personage of mark in the regiment; for when I was summoned to my first parade, I had deliberately donned the clothes which had been dealt out to me from the quartermaster's stores, and presented myself to public view in a uniform which had probably been seen on no parade ground in England since Her late Majesty's accession to the throne. It was a sufficiently solemn proceeding on my own part, for I was warned that I was being guilty of a military misdemeanour of the gravest sort But if the thing was serious to me, it was a matter of rejoicing comedy--or even, if you like, of screaming farce--to the troops who were paraded for church that Sunday morning. Men fairly shrieked with laughter at the sight of the old Kilmarnock cap, the ridiculous tailed jacket, and the rough shoddy trousers bagging at the seat. The officers made an attempt at decorum which was not too successful; and I was hustled from the ground, and escorted to the guard-room, for the high crime and misdemeanour of presuming to appear in the clothes which had officially been served out to me. I appeared at the orderly-room next morning, and underwent a severe wigging from the officer who was in temporary command of the regiment; but the incident was mercifully allowed to close with a mere reprimand. It did a little good, perhaps, for I never knew any other recruit to be served out with an utterly obsolete and useless kit so long as I remained with the regiment; but, until the hour at which my discharge was purchased, I was taught that it was not conducive to personal comfort to rebel against any form of tyranny and extortion which might be condoned by tradition in the Army.

Honestly, I do not think that I look with a jaundiced eye upon my remembrances of that most unhappy time, but, as I remember, to have had an education a little better than that of the average ploughman, and to show an inclination to be smart and quick at duty, was a certain passport to the hostility of the non-commissioned officers of the time. They regarded themselves, as I am now inclined to fancy, as a sort of close corporation, and I cannot help thinking that they felt it a kind of duty to themselves to repress the ambitions of any youngster who seemed likely to be marked for promotion. A mere recruit, who had not yet learned the simple mysteries of the goose-step, had registered an objection to being robbed at the outset of his career, and had thereby revealed himself as a person of dangerous ideas which, if pursued to their ultimate, would make an end of all manner of illegitimate profits; and I am not careful to suggest that any special aptitude for a soldier's life on my own part was responsible for the dead set which was made at me by all the non-coms, of the regiment. There was one troop-sergeant-major, as already stated, who was currently known throughout the corps as The Pig. A furious and determined attempt was made upon his life by a man named Lovell, who was sent to a military convict prison for twelve years, if I remember rightly. Now, I have never heard of any ordinarily decent officer, commissioned or non-commissioned, being assaulted by a subordinate; and the civilian observer of Army life may be assured that, almost without exception, whenever that kind of thing occurs, petty tyrannies and intermeddlings on the part of the superior are answerable for it. I met this particular man on one occasion only. I suppose that I had been pointed out to him as the young insubordinate who had dared to trespass on tradition by wearing the clothes served out to him. He stopped me in the middle of the barrack square at Cahir, and offered me a solemn warning: "You go on as you've begun, young man, and we'll make life hell to you." I do not claim that I am in any special sense a lover of justice, but I know that my gorge rose less at the sense of personal injury, than against a scheme of organised robbery; but, luckily for myself, I refrained from answer, and passed on.

Every man had his nickname in the regiment, and I was christened Oxford. I was on stable sentry duty at some idle high noon of mid-summer, and a playful chum of mine, whose name was Barlow, laid a little trap for me. "Oxford," says he, "who do you think is the ugliest beggar in the regiment?" I answered, without hesitation, "Sergeant So-and-So;" and Sergeant So-and-So was at that very moment coming--miching mallecho--through the stables. He heard both the question and the answer, and he was naturally displeased. From that hour whatever chance I might have had of a peaceful life in the regiment disappeared. The non-coms, began to lay plots against me, and I recall one day in particular, after weeks of rain, during which the horses' legs had been thickening for want of exercise, we got out into a very muddy m?nage with what we called the "young horse ride." I was mounted on a most unmanageable, untrained beast, and before the work was over he was in a lather from nose to tail, and I was encased in mud from the spur to the chrome-yellowed button on the top of my forage cap. It was the custom, after having unsaddled one's mount, to pass a hasty oil-rag over bit and bridoon and stirrups, and then to fall to upon the grooming of the horse. My ugly sergeant had found a collaborateur, who wanted to know what the blank blank I meant by leaving my horse to shiver in the cold whilst I loitered about this customary duty. I set to work upon the horse at once, and, as the collaborating sergeant disappeared at one stable door, my ugly friend turned up at the other, wanting to know why the blank blank I had not oiled my stirrup irons. I took up the discarded oil-rag with all activity; the ugly man vanished, and his collaborateur appeared at the door on the other side of the stables. "Now, didn't I tell you not to let your horse catch cold?" said he. "Haven't you the brains to go and groom him?" I had learned long since the wisdom of silence, and I began to groom with a will. When my ugly friend once more appeared with a command "to the stirrup irons;" back I went, forboding the disaster which swiftly came. The accommodating friend of the ugly man swooped down, and I was haled before the officer on duty on a charge of having thrice neglected to obey a given order. But the colonel of our regiment, the late Sir Charles Cameron Shute, since then for many years Member for Brighton, was at headquarters. He was a good deal of a martinet, but he was justice incarnate. I told my story, and I offered him my witnesses. His word to me was a simple right-about-face and march; but, as I put on my forage cap in the anteroom, I heard him thundering at the accusing sergeants to the effect that he would not have his recruits bullied, that he would not endure to have plots laid against them, and that on any repetition of the manouvre now exposed, he would break the pair of them, and return them to the ranks.

And here occurs what is to me a very curious reminiscence. A dear old great-aunt of mine had purchased my discharge, and had furnished me with money to go home. We were then stationed at Ballincollig, in County Cork, and I had secured a suit of civilian toggery from a Cork tailor. I was waiting for the jaunting car which was to carry me to town, when my ugly friend heaved in sight, and, finding a man in civilian dress with the undeniable air of the barrack-yard upon him, and being, as I guess, a little short-sighted, he saluted me as he would have saluted an officer in passing. Discovering his error, he was very angry, and he began to cite all the pains and penalties to which a man was liable who smoked a cigar within a given distance of some powder-magazine which then existed there. When I had pointed out to him the fact that I was twenty yards beyond the limit, I promised him, with all the sincerity of youth, that whenever and wherever I might meet him in civil life, I would do my honest best to give him a hiding for the twelve months of misery he had caused me. It was years before I saw him again, and he did not know me. I had grown a beard, and an increasing shortness of sight had forced me to the use of an eyeglass. He was a commissionaire at some glassworks which stand opposite to the offices of a journal with which I have been now intimately concerned for some years. I hailed him by name, and asked him why he had left his old regiment He told me that he was suffering from hernia and pulmonary consumption; and when I left the place, after seeing the picture on glass which I had been invited to view, I enjoyed the sweetest vengeance of my lifetime in tipping the ex-sergeant half-a-crown, and in leaving him without any disclosure of my own identity.

I suppose that I should have gravitated into journalism in any case; but it was poor old Dr Kenealy, who was afterwards famous as the intrepid, if ill-tempered, counsel for the Tichborne Claimant, who gave me my first active impulse towards the business. The Borough of Wednesbury had just been created, and my own native parish was a part of it. The Liberals chose as their candidate one Brogden, who had been unseated for bribery at Yarmouth, a fact in his history which did much to enliven trade amongst the local fishmongers, the bloater becoming, as it were, the Tory ensign in all processions and in all public meetings at which the Liberal candidate addressed his future constituents. Two or three men, who afterwards became well known, nibbled at the constituency, and went away again. Among them were the late Samuel Waddy, Q.C., and Mr Commissioner Kerr, who issued an electioneering address of astonishing prolixity, prefacing it with the statement that he had no time to be brief. But Brogden's only real opponent was poor old Kenealy. There was, of course, a Conservative candidate in the field; and, rightly or wrongly, it was said that Kenealy had been brought down in his interest to split the Liberal vote.

I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling, seething cauldron called journalism. The working journalist is found everywhere. Is there a man to be hanged?--the working journalist is present. Exhibitions, processions, coronations, wars, whatever may be going on, wherever the interest of life is richest and the pulse beats fastest, there you find the working journalist. There is no experience in the world which really qualifies a man to take a broad, a sane, an equable view of life in such a degree as journalism.

When first I joined the Press, I took a berth as junior reporter at 25s. per week. I went to George Dawson--one of the highest types of men I have ever known, but one who was a born idle man and loved to talk and talk, and so left no record of himself--I went to dear old Dawson and said, "You are starting a journal, and I want to be on it." What is the bottom rung of the ladder? Well, my work was to report police court cases and inquests. I do not know of a lower rung. I had ambitions and ideas of my own, but I went for whatever came in my way, and I have not repented it until this day, although a good opening into business life awaited me if I chose to accept it in preference.

Almost the first "big thing" I recall in my experience was the first private execution which took place in the English provinces. It was at Worcester, when a man named Edmund Hughes, plasterer's labourer, was hanged for the murder of his wife. I have often thought that if that man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of Othello in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him. He left her, saying that he would see her once again. He borrowed a razor from a friend, went to the place, and nearly severed her head from her body.

Well, I went to see that man hanged. I had never seen anyone die before, and such a thing as death by violence was altogether strange to me. I was told to apply to the sheriff for permission to be present at the execution. I devoutly hoped that permission would be refused, but it was not. I shall not forget the sensation that overcame me as I left the gaol on the night before the man was to be hanged. It was wintry weather and a storm was breaking. The sky seemed, in fact, to be racked with the storm clouds. But through them there was one open space with one bright star visible. That star seemed to carry a promise of something beyond, and I went away somewhat uplifted, though sick and sorry notwithstanding.

I can recall now but a single verse of it, and that, I presume, is kept in mind only by the misprint which blistered every nerve of me for weeks. The verse ran thus:--

"O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable! Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show, Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell, Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go. These lives are counted, the Avenger waits, His feet are heard already at the gates."

And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an "n" for a "v," and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that "these lines" were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the printer's reader who passed his abominable blunder. The most indurated professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all about it.

"Not one, dear Frank, not one white line."

I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal, and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, "We turn to the words of this immortal writer," had a "t" knocked out for him, and was represented as having spoken of "this immoral writer." I was with the dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed himself. The offending "reader" was a married man with a family, and a hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the instant of discovery.

I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board which has ground the lower middle class of England and its labouring population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. "Shoon" and "housen," for example, and now and then a double plural--a compromise between the ancient manner and the new--would creep into their speech; "eysen" was the plural of "eye," "peasen" the plural for "pea;" and the patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to be quoted as "Americanisms," although, as a matter of fact, the "Americanisms" are no more than the survival of the early English form.

And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten miles round but had its own acknowledged bard. There were continual tragedies happening in the coal mines. Men were much more careless in the handling of naked lights than they are now, and the beneficent gift of the Davy lamp was looked on with mistrust. The machinery by which the men were lowered to their work was often inadequate. There was nothing like a scientific system of ventilation and fatalities were appallingly frequent. Whenever one happened, the local bard was ready with his threnody and the little black-bordered, thick leaflets were sold at one penny apiece for the benefit of the survivors. The prince of the poetic throng in my day was one Alfred Randall whom I used to encounter on Sunday mornings on his way to chapel dressed in black broadcloth, with huge, overlapping, rhinocerine folds in it--for, as I have remarked elsewhere, a Black Country tailor who had supplied the customer with merely cloth enough to fit him, would have been thought unpardonably stingy--a very high false collar tied at the back of the neck by a foot or two of white tape which as often as not trailed out behind, a woollen comforter dangling almost to his toes whatever might be the season of year, and the hardest looking and shiniest silk hat to be had for love or money--these were Mr Randall's Sabbath wear, and it always struck me as a child that he had very much of the aspect of a cockatoo in mourning. He was a preternaturally solemn man and when I felt that I could command my features, I used to like to talk with him about his Art, and hear in what manner his inspirations occurred to him. "It's no credit to me," he used to say, with a sort of proud humility, "it's a gift, that's what it is." Mr Randall's views were not always engaged on tragic themes, and I have the most delightful recollections of a pastoral of his entitled:--"Lines on a Walk I once took on a Day in May into the Country." It began thus:--

"It was upon a day in May, When through the fields I took my way. It was delightful for to see The sheep and lambs they did agree.

And as I walked forth on that day I met a stile within my way; That stile which did give rest to me Again I may not no more see."

I had the pleasure to put this effusion into type with my own hands. My father was generally his own proof reader, and when I went to him with the first impression and began to read to him from the manuscript, I was really very terribly afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would break me down.

"As on my way I then did trod The lark did roar his song to God."

I had to laugh, whatever might happen, but to my relief my father laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side in the mine in which he worked:--

"John Williams was a godly man Whose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan, He rose one morning and kissed his wife And promised to be home at night. But ah! he met the fatal flame And never he went home again."

The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old Staffordshire ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it. I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger, who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just cocked his eye towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of d?bris, and saying, "That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer," went on quite composedly with his meal.

But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching. I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening light. "Christianity," he said, "is the moonlight of the soul." It was note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always reserve.

The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world, missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest, the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright--of whom Dawson always spoke as the "great Liberal party"--a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man, whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the Nonconformists of his day and many others.

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