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.



CHAPTER VI

Towards Journalism—Dr Kenealy as Parliamentary Candidate— The Wednesbury Advertiser—George Dawson—The First Private Execution—Misprints—The Black Country Sixty Years Ago—Aunt Rachael—Old Servants—Local Poets—Mining Dangers.

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 found the doctor one night addressing a mere handful of people in a vast building which would have accommodated two or three hundred for every unit he had before him. That was the first occasion in my life on which I wore a dress suit; and amidst the unwashed, coally-flannelled handful, I daresay that my expanse of shirt front, and the flower in my buttonhole, made me conspicuous. I was a red-hot Liberal in those days, for no better reason, probably, than that my father held that form of creed, and I was quite persuaded that Kenealy was a paid impostor. So when, in that raucous voice of his, he said, "I love the working man," I answered from below with a cry of "Bunkum, doctor, bunkum." The doctor paused and looked at me, but said nothing at the moment By and by he flowed on: "When I go to the poll with ten thousand of the working men of this constituency behind me," and I chimed in with a cry of "When, doctor, when?" This time the orator fixed my flint, as the Americans used to say. He surveyed me from top to toe, and he said quietly, and in a tone of deep commiseration: "I pity that drunken blackguard." My first impulse was to spring upon the platform, and to throw the speaker from it; but it was so obvious that I could not clear myself of the imputation cast upon me in that way that I surrendered the idea in the very instant in which it occurred to me. I searched in my own mind for a retort, but I searched in vain; and I spent a good part of that night in the invention of scorching phrases. But the exercise afforded me no relief, and on the following day I sat down and wrote my first newspaper article. We had in our new-made borough, in those days, one ineffective, inoffensive little weekly journal called the Wednesbury Advertiser, and I posted my article to the editor, who, as much to my surprise as my delight, printed it in all the glory of leaded type. I believe I was under the impression that it would kill Kenealy; but, as all the world knows, the poor man survived for years, and died from wholly different causes. That was the determining incident in my career, and for months afterwards I wrote the Advertisers leaders without any sort of agreement, and without receipt or expectation of any kind of pay. It is not because I imagine my work to have been exceptionally brilliant that I am disposed to think that I must have seemed a sort of heaven-sent blessing to my editor (whom I do not remember, by the way, ever to have seen); but at least I did a good share of his work for nothing. I have addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in the art of administration.

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.

When I went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to the scaffold. I pray God I may never see such a sight again. The man was just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself rather too freely with brandy—it was his first experience of this duty—walked in front of the prisoner reciting the "Prayers for the Dead." The poor condemned wretch, who was gabbling one sentence without ceasing, and who was so terribly afraid as to be cognisant of nothing save the fact that he was afraid, had nineteen creaking black steps, newly-tarred, to mount on reaching the scaffold. He turned to the warder and muttered "I can't get up," but the latter slapped him on the back with the utmost bonhomie, and said, "You'll get up all right." He did get up and they hanged him. On the evening of the same day I read the amazing proclamation in the evening papers that "the prisoner met his fate with fortitude." Yet I never in my life saw anything so utterly abject as that man's terror. I have since then come to the belief that the average man has learned the measure of expression of emotion by what he sees in the theatre. In the theatre a man has to make his emotions visible and audible to a large number of people. But in real life deep emotion is silent—I have always found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story.

Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first illustrated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called the Illustrated Midland News, and its editor-in-chief was Mr Joseph Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.

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.

Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr Edmund Yates, who was at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then writing for the Birmingham Morning News, under the title of "A Bad Lot," to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, "Are there no troubles now?" and the lady of his heart responded, "Not one, dear Frank, not one." And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, "White Line," a professional instruction to leave the space of one line blank between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the "comp." who was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus, as if it had been a line of verse:

"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.

For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, the Birmingham Morning News, and, as I have already said, I was employed by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands of people. I reckon him to have been, upon the whole, potentially the greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide, though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception, the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the worship of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified; but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to the community, and that it was a man's duty to button up his pocket at the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted, big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a trail behind him.

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.

If I had only had the brains to know it, there lay before me as fine a field as any craftsman in the art of fiction ever had a chance to glean in. It is an impertinence for a man to speak of his own work, but I have often thought in my own story of Aunt Rachel, there is at least an adumbration of what a man aimed with real sympathy and humour might have done with the people of that place and time. When I say that the characters in Aunt Rachel are all real, I do not mean to make the foolish boast that they are all alive. I mean simply to say that they are all sketches from the life and are as true to their own lineaments as my hand could make them. The old musical enthusiast who, having heard Paganini, laid down his bow for ever because he could be content with nothing less than the great virtuoso's perfections, was a maternal great-uncle of mine, and the pathetic little story of the manner in which the life-long severance between himself and his sweetheart was brought about is literally true. "Aunt Rachel" herself in her extremely starched and dignified old age was a constant visitor at my mother's house. She had, for a space of something like forty years, had charge of successive generations of children in a stately country house in Worcestershire, and when she was honourably pensioned and retired, she used to boast, in her prim way, that she was not unacquainted with the airs and graces of the higher powers. She must at least have reached the age of fourscore when on one occasion she had lingered at my mother's house until darkness fell. The cottage she lived in was a mile away and was approached by a somewhat lonely road. My brother Tom, at that time a stalwart lad of eighteen, was suggested to her as an escort. The little old lady drew herself up to the full height of her dignity. It was a saying of hers that she could not by any loyal person be described as a female of inferior stature, since she was but one barleycorn less in height than Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. She rebuked my mother with a solemnity which laid a heavy tax on our politeness. "No, Mary, my dear," she said, "I will go alone; I have my reputation to consider."

One meets rarely at this time the example of the attached old school of servants, who used to identify themselves with the household to which they ministered. The faithful servant of the antique world is dead, but I remember dozens of instances in my childhood where even in establishments as humble as our own, a domestic who had entered into service in early childhood had stayed on until age or a by no means premature marriage put an end to the association. One of my mother's maids stayed with her for a matter of some thirty years and finally left her to share the destinies of a working mason. The honest fellow had just fulfilled a profitable, small contract in so satisfactory a manner that he was offered something bigger which, in due time, was followed by a something bigger yet. In a while, Jane was keeping her carriage, but on her frequent visits to her old mistress her demeanour never changed, unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected little draggle-tail from the workhouse and to turn her into an efficient maid-of-all-work. When this self-imposed duty was accomplished, the maid invariably went elsewhere in search of higher wages, so that my mother was rarely without some slatternly little pupil whom she was drilling into ways of household order. Jane came one day in her rustling silks and streamers to announce a discovery. "The very girl you want, ma'am; I am sure you could turn her into a perfect treasure." "Well, Jane," said my mother, "you know what I want. I want three qualities in a girl and if she has them, I can make a good servant of her. I want her to be honest and willing and clean. Is she honest?" "As the day, ma'am," says Jane. "And is she willing?" "Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am." "And is she clean?" "Clean, ma'am," says Jane, raising her black gloved hands to emphasise the affirmation, "she's scrofulously clean!"

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 debris, and saying, "That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer," went on quite composedly with his meal.



CHAPTER VII

George Dawson as Editor—Birmingham Politicians—John Blight's Nervousness—The Black Lake Rescue—The Pelsall Hall Colliery Disaster—Archibald Forbes—Out of Work— Edmund Yates and The World—The Hangman-Human Oddities— A Mislaid Cheque—Hero Worship—Three Stories of Carlyle— Journalism.

For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion he would make his daily leader. "Now," he would say, "take that to your own room and get as much as you can of it into a column." I made no notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap. But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation. I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said: "The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact." Of another person whom I will not name, he said: "You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort of Half Hours with the Best Authors, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea."

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.

There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of the Bards of the Bible and other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when his congregation built this church for him: "You have started the Church of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church." To which the other George fittingly responded "that the Church had its Saviour already and it was a plain man's business to preach His plain meaning." But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have not heard from other mortal lips—I do not hope to hear again—such an expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abasement before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the far-off haven to which creation moves.

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.

On one memorable afternoon, he introduced me to John Bright. I do not think I ventured to take any share in the conversation between the two, but I recall one interesting passage of it "Tell me, friend George," said Bright, "you have, I suppose, as large an experience in public speaking as any man in England. Have you any acquaintance with the old nervous tremor still?" "No," said Dawson, "or if I have, it is a mere momentary qualm which is gone before I can realise it." "Now, for my part," said the great Tribune, "I have had practice enough but I have never risen to address an audience, large or small, without experiencing a shaking at the knees and the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat."

When I enlisted under Dawson's banner, on the Birmingham Morning News, I was the junior reporter, but in the course of a month or two, I was promoted and became the recognised descriptive writer on the staff. Throughout my journalistic experience I have been fortunate in one respect. The men under whom I have worked have, for the most part, had the knack of extorting one's best, and one of the ways of extorting the best of an enthusiastic youngster is to let him know cordially when he has done well. I shall never forget the flush of resolve which came over me when Dawson first laid his hand upon my shoulder with a cheery "Bravo, my lad," in acknowledgment of a piece of work of mine. It was the first really great chance I had had. I was just newly married at the time and supposing my work to be over for the day I was taking my way homeward, when the printer's "devil" overtook me after a breathless run and told me that I was wanted at the office. I went back to learn that there was a mine on fire at Black Lake, some seven miles away, and I was bidden to go and see what was to be seen there.

A hasty search through the time-table showed that there was no train running in that direction for an hour or two and so I was bidden to take a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The mine was situated in the midst of an open field and there was a great surging crowd about it which made way for me at a word. Round about the bed shafts of the mine, the downcast and the upcast, a little space was held voluntarily clear and half a dozen men in coaly flannels were standing there. A little tin pot of an engine in a miniature of an engine-house was labouring and panting at a little distance, and almost as I arrived upon the scene, the great iron bucket capable of containing as I should judge some five or six hundred gallons, was brought from the upcast, lowered there, set upon a trolley and then run along the rails until it could be emptied into the shaft in which the fire was raging.

This poor attempt to extinguish the flames was continued for perhaps a quarter of an hour, but at last one of the little band said, "This is no good, lads, we might as well stand round in a ring and spit at it. We shall have to get the 'Stinktors' out. A man or two will have to go down." The coal-smeared men were all standing close together and they looked at each other with faces pale beneath the grime. For a second or two none of them spoke, but at last one said, "Will you make one?" and the first man answered with a mere nod and a sullen-sounding growl. The others were appealed to each in turn, and each gave the same sulky seeming acquiescence. I had at the moment no idea as to what it was actually proposed to do, but the plan was soon made clear. What the first speaker had called "stinktors" turned out to be little barrel-shaped objects about one foot by two.

They were called "l'extincteur," and they contained some gas which in combination with water was fatal to fire. But when I reflected that in a confined space like that into which they proposed to venture, any gas which was fatal to fire would in all probability be fatal to human life, I almost wondered if the men were mad. Mad or no, they made their preparations with a deliberate swiftness which showed that they knew perfectly well what they were about. The man who had first proposed the venture was the first to set out upon it. The large iron bucket, technically called "bowk," was attached to the steel wire rope which hung about the smouldering shaft. The man stepped into this, the chain was passed about his waist, he was smothered in heavy flannels which were tied about him with cords; the end of a long coil of dirty, oily, coaly, three-ply twine was fastened round his right wrist, and he was swung into the smoke. The word was passed to the engine-room, the little tin pot of an engine began to pant and snort 30 or 40 yards away and the man dropped out of sight. The coal-smeared comrade who had charge of the twine paid it out delicately fathom by fathom. It was the only link between the adventurer down below and the chance of life, and the merest tug at it would have caused an immediate reversal of the engine and would have brought him back to bank. But no signal came, and for anything that anybody there could have told, the man below might have been suffocated by the smoke. There was not a sound to be heard but the creaking of the wheel as it revolved above the shaft and the hoarse panting of the little engine, and the crowd which had by this time grown to vast dimensions waited in so tense a silence that there was something awful in it.

How long we waited I cannot tell, but at last the signal came. The word was flashed to the engine room and the rope came gliding swiftly upwards. The hero was comatose and was hanging all limp and loose by the chain which had been passed about his waist. He was seized, swung to one side and lowered and landed and one great fiery flake of flannel as big as a man's hand fell from the rough garments in which he was swathed from head to foot. A bottle of whisky came from somewhere and was put to his lips and in a while he recovered consciousness though he was still gasping and choking and his eyes were streaming. In the meantime another man, as good as he, was ready, and he came back, as it turned out afterwards, blinded for life, but neither that nor anything that fear could urge could stay the rest, and man after man went down and faced that lurid smoke and hell of darkness undismayed, until at last their valour won the day and they brought out every man and boy and beast. One coaly giant yelled, "That's the lot," when the last batch came up, and then the crowd went mad, weeping, cheering, dancing mad. I have seen many deeds of valour in my time, both in peace and war, but I have never seen anything to match the Black Lake rescue for deliberate courage.

I feel inclined to say less about the courage displayed by the members of the next rescue party whose work I saw, for the very sufficient reason that I was a member of it To tell the honest truth, I had not the remotest idea that I was courting any sort of danger. At the Pelsall Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of absolute starvation. There was always the certainty that the inrush of water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact, proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the first body was recovered.

I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began it in a rather curious fashion. The place was a wretched little mining village with a solitary beer shop in it, and there was only one house in which it was possible to secure decent accommodation. I bargained with its tenant for a bed, and agreed to pay him half-a-crown a night for the accommodation. Forbes had made a precisely similar arrangement with the woman of the house, and there was but a single bedroom to be disposed of. Neither of us knew anything of the other's bargain until the following morning. Forbes was under the belief that an attempt at descent was intended to be made that night, and that it was to break into an old abandoned air-way which had long been bricked up at the side of the shaft, and was believed to lead to the stables of the mine which were situated at a point above the level of the flood.

The dialect of the Black Country, when spoken at its broadest, is not easy for a stranger to understand. I, as a native of the district, was of course familiar with it, but Forbes was out of his element altogether, and might almost have tried talking chockjaw. I, knowing perfectly well that the intended attempt could not be made for at least twenty-four hours, went away with a comfortable mind and slept in Bailey's cottage. When I left the door next morning I saw striding towards me through the mud a very begrimed and unprepossessing-looking figure. It was, after all, a man with a two days' beard, a very dirty face, a collarless, grimy shirt, who wore heavy ankle Jack-boots, and had his trousers rolled above his ankles. This person accosted me brusquely. "What are you doing in that cottage there?" he asked me, and I asked in turn, "what business of his that might be." He told me he had hired and paid for the only available bed in the house from the landlady, and I told him that I had hired and paid for the same accommodation through the landlord. The stranger claimed precedence, and was good enough to tell me that if he found me attempting to infringe upon his privileges he would take the liberty of throwing me out of the window. I was five-and-twenty at this time, stood five feet eleven in my socks, and reckoned myself a pretty good man with my hands, as a pupil of the old Slasher had a right to be, and in considerable wrath at the stranger's insolence, I drew myself up shoulder to shoulder with him, and told him hotly that that was a game that two might play at. There came a quiet humorous gleam into his eye, and when he looked at me for half a minute he burst into a great roar of laughter. "Newspaper man?" he asked me. I answered in the affirmative, and he stretched out an unwashed hand. "I am Forbes," he said. "I am here for the Daily News; if I can't bully a man I make friends with him."

Now Forbes for years had been one of my heroes and I was simply delighted to meet him. We struck up an immediate friendship but in an hour he turned into bed and I saw him no more until the following morning when I believed that I had made of him an enemy for life. I learned at the mine head the hour at which the rescue party was to descend and I made arrangements to join it. Then I walked in to Walsall and there hired a saddle horse which I bestowed in the stables of the beer shop. This done, I made my way back to the mine and found the party just in readiness to make the descent. There were six of us, all told, and the little contingent was captained by Mr Walter Neas, who, partly as a reward for gallantry as I believe, was afterwards appointed manager of Her Majesty's mines in Warora, Central India. We were all lowered in a skip together and the position of the air-way having been precisely ascertained one man lay face downwards on the skip's bottom and broke through the brickwork with a pick. The sullen waters of the pool were only some eight or ten feet beneath us. The bricks splashed in one after the other until there was a space large enough for a man to whirl himself into it, and one by one we entered the passage. It was a tremendous scramble, and here and there the roof of the place had sunk so low that we had hard work to squeeze through on our hands and knees. In places we had almost space to walk upright. We came at last upon a face of brick, the wall of the stable for which we were bound and beyond which there was some faint hope of finding the imprisoned men. The sound of our picks elicited no response though we paused more than once to listen, but the wall being at length broken down, we entered the stable and I was the first of the party to perceive the dead body of a man who sat leaning against the wall of coal looking for all the world like a wax-work figure.

I was holding a candle to the dead man's face and we were all gathered round when the light went out suddenly as if it had been quenched in water. In a second we were in pitch darkness and our leader called out "Choke damp—back for your lives," and in the pitchy darkness back we struggled. I have forgotten to say that water was running down the air-way like a little mill-stream, though it was barely over shoe-tops. We scrambled on with the deadly gas following us, sucked and drawn along by the draught of air. I was last but one and was saved many of the bruises and excoriations which befell the leader. The warning voice would come out of the darkness, "duck here," or "hands and knees," and on we toiled, panting and perspiring, until we reached the shaft and were all drawn up again. I dried myself roughly before a roaring fire in the hovel of the mine and then made all haste to the beer shop where I mounted my horse and rode full tilt into Birmingham. The paper had gone to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was, to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode back to Pelsall. There I found Forbes at breakfast—he asked where I had been and I produced the paper and showed my work in silence. He read it through without a word of comment, good, bad or indifferent, laid it down upon the table and left the room. I heard him rummaging about in the chamber overhead and by and by he came down with a portmanteau in his hand and without a word or a look left the house. I thought that he was galled to feel that he had been beaten by a novice.

Two years had elapsed when I met him again. I found him by hazard in the Ludgate Bar, which was then a great resort of the bigger men among the London journalists. As I entered he sat among a knot of his companions. Tom Hood was there as I remember, and Henry Sampson, founder of the Referee with Major Henty, the famous writer of books for boys, and poor brilliant young Evelyn Jerrold. Forbes greeted me boisterously, and, springing from his seat, clapped me upon the back. He took me to his friends and introduced me with words that put me to the blush. "Here," said he, "is a man who writes English, and here is the only man who ever beat me on my own ground." "No," I answered, "it was my ground, Mr Forbes, and I should not have beaten you if you had spoken the language of the natives." I never had a better or more generous friend than Forbes.

The World Journal, founded by Edmund Yates, was just then entering into its first dawn of success. Forbes had been asked to write a series of articles for it on a subject which, as he confessed, had no particular charm for him. He handed it over to me and that gave me my first chance in the higher journalism of London. But I am running far ahead now and there is much to tell before my narrative arrives legitimately at this point.

The Birmingham Morning News was a financial failure from the first, and towards the end of its second year its proprietors determined to reconstruct it. How or by whom they were advised I never knew, but a person who had no acquaintance either with finance or with journalism was entrusted with the command and Dawson threw up his post in dudgeon. I had fully intended to resign with him, but I had no time given me in which to do it, and in the space of a few weeks after the arrival of the newcomer, I was free to seek my fortune in London. By the good offices of the late Charles Williams, war correspondent on the staff of the Morning Advertiser, I was introduced to Colonel Richards, the editor of that journal, and did actually secure a berth as gallery reporter, but I was suddenly called back to the country by a grave domestic trouble, no less than the illness of my wife, which terminated fatally eight or nine weeks g 97 Recollections later. When I returned to London my place was filled and for a while the outlook was extremely desolate. My funds were very limited to begin with, and in spite of all the care I could exercise they dwindled at an appalling rate. I abode in a shabby little back bedroom in a lodging off the Gray's Inn Road and sat at my table wrapped in an ulster to prevent myself from freezing, whilst I wrote, and sent broadcast prose and verse, essays, short stories, journalistic trifles of every kind. All were ignored or returned.

Where the handsome offices of the Daily News now stand in Bouverie Street, there was at that time a doleful place of resort for life's failures. It was called the Sussex Hotel. The habitues of the place were for the most part broken journalists and barristers, some of whom were men of considerable native talent and attainment. They were mostly given to drink, but they contrived to maintain at least such an outward semblance of respectability as enabled them to loaf about the Fleet Street offices and bars without being actually the objects of derision. I do not suppose that there is anywhere at this time such a contingent to be found in London. I went to live amongst them for economy's sake. We each paid sixpence a night in advance for a bed, the linen of which had a look of having been washed in tobacco juice and dried up a chimney. When a guest had paid his money, he was supplied with a key and about an inch of thin candle, which was affixed by its own grease to a broken shard of pottery. I spent about six weeks there and during the latter part of the time at least, my one daily meal consisted of a hard-rinded roll and thick chocolate. My belongings had all dwindled away, and at last I found myself penniless and homeless in the midst of London.

It is not, when all is said and done, a very dreadful thing for a healthy man to be without food for a few days, nor is it such a hardship as the fastidious might fancy to snatch one's nightly rest on the benches of the Embankment. I passed four nights there, chivied with the rest of the abject crowd by the ubiquitous policeman with his eternal "Wake up, move on there!" and for four days I was entirely without food. I can quite honestly say that I cared very little for these things in themselves, but where the iron enters into a man's soul in such conditions is when he feels that his degradation is unmerited and knows that he has powers within him which, if he could find a vent for them, might lead him on to fame and fortune. The exasperating raging bitterness of this, the grudging envy with which he looks at those more fortunate than himself, whose intellectual equipment he despises, these are the things which sear the heart.

I had resolved—let come what might come—that I would never go home to confess myself a failure. The thing, of course, might have had a tragic ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises as that in which I was engaged, but in my case, fate ordered otherwise, I have told the tale elsewhere, but it will bear re-telling. I was drifting about Fleet Street, mournfully conscious of the extent to which my appearance had deteriorated, of the unblacked boots and the yellow linen, and the general air of being unkempt and unwashed, when I found myself standing in front of the window of a filter-maker's shop, close by old Temple Bar. In this window were displayed a number of glass domes, under each of which a little jet of water tossed about a cork ball. The ball would soar sometimes to the roof of the dome and would then topple over, sometimes to be caught midway upon the jet and sometimes to fall to the bottom, but always to be kept drenched and dancing in a melancholy futile way. I was comparing it with myself when a hand was clapped upon my shoulder and a jolly voice accosted me. The speaker was John Lovell, the president of the Press Association, which had its offices in Wine Office Court hard by. He could not have failed to be aware of my condition, but he gave no sign of having observed it and asked me if I could spare the time to earn a couple of guineas, by writing "a good, sea-salt, tarry British article about Christopher Columbus." Time pressed, he told me, and he was too busy to undertake the article himself. If I would accompany him to the office, he would supply me with the necessary materials and would pay money down for the work. On to the office I went with him, with a sudden bright confidence that here at last the lane of ill-luck had found a turning. I was ushered into a little private room, and writing materials were set before me. In a couple of hours I sent in my copy, and there came back to me at once a pill-box, on the lid of which was inscribed in a very delicate handwriting, "The prescription to be taken immediately." The box being opened was found to contain two sovereigns and two shillings, wrapped in cotton wool, and I went away to break a fast which was then entering on its fifth day. My next proceeding, after having somewhat refurbished myself, was to go back to the dingy old hole in Bouverie Street and to write an article on "Impecunious Life in London."

During the brief run of the Illustrated Midlands News, to which I had been a frequent contributor of verse, the late Richard Gowing, then editor of the School Board Chronicle, had officiated as Mr Joseph Hatton's assistant editor. He had just acquired the copyright in the Gentleman's Magazine, and I bethought me that here lay my opportunity. I took the article to him, and after turning the manuscript pages swiftly over, he decided to accept it. It ran, I think, to two and thirty pages, and I received his cheque for ten shillings and sixpence a page.

Thus armed, I felt more than fit to face the world again, and it was whilst I was yet in this new flush of fortune that I walked into the Ludgate Bar as already recorded, and for the second time encountered Archibald Forbes.

And now began a period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand times more about the taste and temper of the public.

He had conceived the idea of a series of articles on our civilisation, in which the writer should deal with the sores and oddities of it, and into this work I plunged with all the splendid vigour and avidity of youth, I chose the hangman as my first theme, because I happened to have had an acquaintance with a gentleman of that profession, and to have been engaged in some personal dealings with him. His name was James Smith, and he lived about midway between Rowley Regis and Dudley. I held that property in trust for my infant daughter, and the rents were collected for me weekly by a little lame clockmaker named Chesson. At one time my business often led me along that road, and I was familiar with the figure of a great, sprawling, muscular-looking, idle fellow, who, whenever I passed him, was leaning across the garden-gate in his shirt sleeves and smoking. He seemed to have no sort of employment, and, though I did not notice it at the time, it occurred to me afterwards, when I knew the truth about him, that I had never seen him exchange so much as a passing salutation with a single human creature. The rents came in regularly for some time, and then it was reported to me that my idle tenant had not paid. Time went on, and the idle tenant never paid. I determined to look into the thing myself, and I set out with the lame clockmaker to interview the man. He was sprawling over the gate as usual when we reached his cottage, and, to my surprise, the little lame man lagged some yards behind and refused to approach him. I explained my errand to the idle tenant, and he lugged out a handful of half-crowns.

"That cove," he said, indicating the clockmaker "'as never been a-nigh me this four months. The money's always bin 'ere for 'im if 'e'ed a-come for it. What d'you take me for?" he asked savagely. "I ain't a wild beast, am I? It's Government work, and somebody's got to do it." It turned out upon inquiry that my collector had actually paid three or four weeks' instalment out of his own pocket, rather than face the hangman, after he had discovered the nature of his trade. I am not writing melodrama, but it is a simple fact that I have never seen a man more profoundly distressed. The hangman's speech was broken and obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint together.

His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes, has some sort of human feeling.

At the time at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who, for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the pawn-broker—a harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned out my first contribution to the World, he sat painting and smoking close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the passion, the very rage of achievement, which possessed one's work, are not to be forgotten. The work took Yates's fancy mightily, and he had the good sense and generosity to let me know it. The Bentley Balladist wrote years ago:

"Excuse me, gents, but to poetic ponies, One ounce of praise is worth ten tons of corn."

Yates did not stint the corn because he was generous with the praise, and throughout our association he was most unfailingly good and kind. He was a bitter enemy and a hard striker, and he went into battle with a good heart and made for himself many foes, but a more loyal colleague and leader it would have been hard to find.

My search for human oddities led me into strange places and made me acquainted with strange people. The most astonishing and complete example of human vanity and pretence I ever encountered was one of these. He was a pavement artist and he had a pitch outside the railings of the great terminus in Euston Road, where he used to sit and patronise London. There was something in the fellow's look which invited me, and when I got into conversation with him, I learned that nothing but jealousy had kept him from taking a high place as a scene-painter, and that artists of far less merit than himself had a place, year after year, on the line at the Academy. Where he had picked up his phrases it was of course impossible to guess, but he talked a good deal of the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, which resulted from his artistic occupation.

He had one awful daub which he called "The Guardship Attacked," in which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me was his "chef de hover," and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for his 'bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week's time he brought the work to me. My chum's painting tools and easels were scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said: "Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush." I took him outside to give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the unmistakable no accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson's Eccles.

My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar knowledge of Gee's Court I have not been near the place now for more than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it was an awful place, the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, the vilest offsprings of the streets of London. What with the aid of the Scripture-readers, the various nursing and charitable sisterhoods, and the young medical accoucheurs in their fourth year, with whom I scraped acquaintance, I got to be quite well known in Gee's Court and could go about in safety. But one evening as I was entering the low-browed slimy archway by which it was approached from Oxford Street, a young policeman stopped me and asked me if I knew where I was going. I told him that I was quite intimate with the place and quite safe there. "Well, sir," he answered, "you know your own business best, but I wouldn't go along there for a fiver." My investigations had by this time brought me acquainted as I have said already with all manner of queer people. Amongst others I recall an omnibus driver who told me that he was the rightful heir to a big estate by Guilford. At my invitation he told his story, and he began it with this astounding proclamation: "It's like this, sir," he began, "my grandfather died childless," and when I failed to disguise my amusement he explained. "He was not really my grandfather but he was my father's uncle and we always called him grandfather." Then he went into a long and tangled statement of which I could neither make head nor tail, but the fact remained clear that in his own opinion he ought to have been a millionaire or thereabouts, and by rights able to pass his time in smoking cigars and drinking champagne wine, which he appeared to regard as the summit of human felicity.

The contract I had made with Edmund Yates was for a series of thirteen articles, and when it was fulfilled, there was no more immediate work for me to do and another little period of stress set in. But in the meantime I had written a little handful of short stories, and one of these, entitled An old Meerschaum, I sent in to Messrs Chatto & Windus. It owed its immediate acceptance to an accident Mr George Augustus Sala had agreed with that firm to supply a two-part story entitled Dr. Cupid. For some reason or another the second part of this story was never forthcoming, and my copy arriving in the nick of time was used to stop the gap. It brought me a regular commission, and month by month thereafter, for quite a considerable time, I contributed a short story to the Belgravia Magazine. Very early in the history of this connection a curious accident happened. I was looking forward to a cheque for seventeen guineas and it came to me as a surprise when, from paymasters so scrupulously punctual, no cheque arrived at the date fixed for its delivery. I could afford to wait for a day or two and I waited, but by and by things became pressing. My landlord, who was a sorter in the Post Office and not particularly well paid, grew exigent The supply in the cupboard became scanty and yet scantier. I found my way to "my uncle's" once more, and week after week went by until I was once more face to face with that grim phantom of actual want which I had already once encountered. Partly from pride and partly from fear of disturbing a valuable arrangement, I refrained from any approach to my publishers, but at last when I had decided upon it as an unavoidable necessity, a slatternly little maid came in with a dirty mildewed envelope between finger and thumb and said she thought that it was addressed to me. I pounced upon it and there, all soaked and bedraggled but still quite legible, I found the cheque, which had been sent to me nearly a month before, and it had been by some accident dropped into the area where it had lain unregarded all this time. There was a feast that night, but the truth is that life was one constant vicissitude, an unfailing series of ups and downs, of jolly happy-go-lucky rejoicings with comrades who were equally careless with myself, and of alternating spells of hardship. "Literature," said Sir Walter, "is an excellent walking stick but a very bad crutch," and so in truth I have found it all my days.

As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this time of day, pathetic to remember. I knew him from his portraits at a glance and I was assured of his identity, if any assurance had been necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the big circular hall found it necessary to pass the place at which he had taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a 'bus bound for Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken. When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched until the door closed behind him.

A week later Dawson was lecturing at the Birkbeck Institute and I went to hear him and afterwards drove with him to the Victoria Hotel at Euston where he was staying for the night. I told him of the tremendous adventure just recounted and he asked me if I would like to meet Carlyle. In the explosive mood which came natural to seven and twenty, I answered that I would go on my hands and knees from there to Chelsea only to hear him speak and to be able to boast that I had shaken him by the hand. "No need for that," said Dawson, "I'll take you to him one of these days, when I have an hour or two to spare in town," and then he began to tell me that he had often thought of leaving behind him some intimate record of his association with the great man whose most popular and familiar translator he himself had been to the people of England. "But," he acknowledged, "I have always been too busy or too idle and I begin to fear that that duty will never be performed. I'll tell you what," he added suddenly, "I'll hand the whole thing over to you if you care to have it. I make a point of going now and then down to Rickmansworth, where I had my first cure of souls and where there are still a few of my old friends left. We'll go down there together and have a quiet day." Dawson began straightway to open, as it were, a bag of samples. He told me three stories of Carlyle; they were all I ever had from him, for that was the last occasion on which we met. I learned that when Carlyle, who was then engaged in the preparation of those seven tremendous volumes of The Life of Frederick the Great, made an excursion into Germany for the purpose of getting a view of his hero's battlefields, Dawson was one of his travelling companions—the other was a German gentleman who, according to my old chiefs account, did a great deal of what he Called the underground work on which Carlyle's monumental edifice was reared. The trio, if I remember rightly, rested at Munich and the historian expressed a wish to find some quiet place in which he could assort his notes and at the same time enjoy a day or two's repose. Dawson and his companion set themselves to work and found a charming little farmhouse within easy distance of the city. "And between ourselves," said he, "we weren't sorry to be left for a little while to our own devices; we were like a pair of schoolboys broken loose. We went to the theatre and afterwards dropped in to listen to the music in the Beer Garden and altogether we made rather a late night of it. We were breakfasting in the open air at our hotel the next morning about eleven o'clock when suddenly I spied Carlyle with his coat tails flying and his old felt hat rammed on angrily anyhow. He was gesticulating wildly with his walking-stick and began to talk whilst he was twenty yards away. 'Ca' ye that a quiet place?' he shouted, 'ca' ye that a quiet place? At three o'clock they damned cocks began to crow, and a hour later they damned oxen began to low and every dog was barking for a mile around; and that,' he said, casting both hands to heaven as if he were appealing for a judgment on some heart-breaking iniquity, 'and that's your notion of a quiet place!' The culprits looked guiltily at each other, but for the life of them they could not refrain from smiling; the smile became a laugh in spite of effort, and Carlyle, after one withering glance at the pair of them and one frenzied exclamation of 'Ma Goad!' dropped suddenly into a chair and laughed uproariously."

When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living—the whole world was rotten and wrong—and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's Golden Legend, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. "And in a world like this, George," he was concluding with a tragic emphasis, "I see nothing for it, for two honest men like you and me, but just to sit down on yon heap of road metal and have a quiet smoke together."

I wish I could tell the third story with half the gusto with which Dawson related it. At the time of that visit to Germany of which I have already spoken, there was no Prussian Empire. Bismarck may, even then, have dreamed of it, but what is now a united Germany was split into an infinite number of little principalities. In one of these, a Serene Transparency—or some personage of that order—held rule over a handful of subjects. It happened that he was a profound worshipper of Carlyle, regarding him as the greatest humorist, philosopher and historian of his age. He wrote to Carlyle a letter full of German enthusiasms, begging him to name an hour at which he could present himself for the personal delivery of his homage. "But," said Carlyle, "we are in the man's territory and it is only in the fitness of things that we should pay our respects to him." Accordingly the two set out together and reaching the palace proposed to send in their names. They were encountered by some kind of glorified flunkey, an official of the toy court of the principality—who assured Carlyle that it was impossible to present him to the Serene Transparency in the costume he was then wearing. Carlyle wanted sardonically to know what was the matter with the costume, and the major-domo instanced his hat. Carlyle tore the hat savagely from his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees, embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. Carlyle's face was a wonder for wrath and astonishment, but that of the court official was beyond speaking for amazement. Who or what he supposed the visitor to be was altogether beyond conjecture!

I was still waiting for that promised invitation to Rickmansworth when Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it, from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane's Inn—long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his finger on a cross-headed paragraph, "Death of George Dawson, M.A." Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me again. The whole world went dark and empty—George Dawson dead! He had been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and waste.

If you search all the professions round, you will not find one in which men display such an extraordinary divergence of intellect and acquirement as you will if you turn to journalism. There are men employed in that craft who are better qualified for Cabinet rank than half the men who ever hold it, and there are, or used to be in my time, hundreds of intelligences as purely mechanical as if they had been born to be hodmen. With one of the latter species I was officially associated for a year. He is now dead and no truth can hurt his feelings any more, but I think he was about as ignorant and self-satisfied an ass as I can remember to have encountered anywhere. There was one thing to be said for him: he had mastered the intricacies of Pitman's shorthand system and wrote it almost to perfection. You might rely upon him to get down in his note-book every word he heard, or thought he heard, but in transcription he sometimes achieved a most extraordinary and unlooked-for effect, as for example: A meeting of the Licensed Victuallers' Association was held in the lower grounds at Aston, and Mr Newdigate—the member for North Warwickshire—presided over it, and during the annual address—what else the right honourable gentleman had to say I have long since forgotten—he wound up by quoting a verse from Lord Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere ":—

"Howe'er it be it seems to me Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."

This the shorthand genius rendered in the manner following:—"The right honourable gentleman, who resumed his seat amidst loud and prolonged cheers, concluded by remarking that however it might represent itself to others it appeared to him that the only true nobility consisted in goodness, that kind hearts were better than coronets, and that simple faith was more to be esteemed than Norman blood." Somehow this passed the printer's reader and appeared in all the glory of type the following morning. It fell to my lot to take the criminal to task, but he disarmed me by a mere turn of the hand. "I don't call it fair," he said, in his soft, insinuating Rother-ham accent, "to expect a man to have all English literature at his fingers' ends for five and thirty bob a week, and beside that, if you look at Mr Pitman's preface to his last edition" (he produced the book from his coat pocket), "you'll find it set down as an instruction to all shorthand writers that it's a reporter's duty to make good speeches for bad speakers. I have got down what he said right enough, but I thought I'd touch him up a bit!"

On another occasion the improver of Tennyson came across from the Town Hall to the office with the final "turn" of an address which had just been delivered by Mr Bright to his constituents. "I'm in a bit of a difficulty," he explained to me breathlessly, "there's old Bright been havering about in his customary manner and he has been talking about Hercules and some kind of stables. I got a 'j' and an 'n' down on my notes, but I forgot to vocalise the word and I can't remember it." I suggested Augean. "That's it," he said joyfully, "but, my word! what a memory you've got to be sure!"

One almost incredible example of mental agility he gave me. He came to me one day beaming with an unusual complacency, and announced that he had made a discovery. He had an absolutely hairless, shining dome of head, and he confided to me the fact that the boys in Rotherham seventeen years ago had nicknamed him "bladder o' lard." "I could never make out what they meant by it," he said, "until this morning I was standing in front of my looking-glass shaving, and it came to me at a run—they gave me that nickname because I'm bald!"



CHAPTER VIII

The House of Commons Press Gallery—Disraeli as Orator—The Story of the Dry Champagne—The Labour Member—Dr Kenealy's Fiasco—Mr Newdigate's Eloquence—Lord Beaconsfield's Success—"Stone-walling"—Robert Lowe's Classics—The Press Gallery and Mr Gladstone.

I forget precisely how it came about that I secured my first sessional appointment in the gallery of the House of Commons. Some member of the reporting staff of the Daily News was disabled or had gone upon the spree. Anyway the staff was shorthanded for a night, and I was told that I could earn a guinea by presenting myself to the chief at the House of Commons, and that there would probably be very little indeed to do for it. I attended accordingly and found that my whole duty for the evening consisted in inscribing on three separate sheets of paper, "Murray follows Murphy—Pullen follows." I got my guinea and was instructed to appear again on the following afternoon when I found a very different condition of affairs prevailing. Every bench was packed, the side galleries were full, and it would have been impossible to squeeze another person into the Stranger's Gallery above the clock. A great field night was toward, and from the time at which I first entered the box at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon until two the following morning, my pencil was kept going without cessation, note-taking or transcribing.

I have quite forgotten what the fight was about, but it was then that I first caught sight of the parliamentary heroes of the time. Gladstone was in his place with Hartington and Bright and the rugged Forster, and Sir William Harcourt and all the rest of his henchmen. Disraeli sat impassive opposite with folded arms and closed eyes, with his chin resting on his breast. The only clear impression I brought out of the rush and hurry of the night was that whereas Disraeli, whenever it came to be my turn to be in the reporter's box, was apparently sound in slumber and utterly oblivious of all that was going on, he rose an hour after midnight and presented a masterly analysis of the whole debate, interspersed with snatches of a fine ironic mockery. His method as an orator was far from being impressive or agreeable, his voice was veiled and husky, and once or twice when he dropped the ironic vein and affected to be serious, he seemed to me to fall into burlesque. "It would be idle," he said, and there he brought his elbows resoundingly to his ribs, "to suppose"—and there the elbows came down energetically again—"that at such a crisis"—and here was another repetition of the grotesque gesture—"Her Majesty's Ministers"—more rib and elbow work—"would endeavour," and so on and so on, in what seemed to one listener at least to be the merest insincerity. His irony was perfect, his assumption of earnestness a farce. Robert Lowe was put up to answer him, and after coughing out a score or two of biting trenchant phrases, with a page of notes almost touching his white albino eyebrows and the tip of his nose, every sentence punctuated with a roar of laughter, cheers and protests, he sat down. Among the speakers I heard that night were Mr Beresford Hope and Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the latter of whom offered to the House quite a sheaf of carefully prepared impromptu. Again I got my guinea, and again I was asked to appear on the following night, and at the end of that week, the defaulting member of the staff not having again put in an appearance, I was formally enrolled for the rest of the session. I do not profess to record in anything like their chronological order the events which most impressed me, but many scenes occur to me as being worth remembering.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Disraeli's careless audacity was afforded on the occasion on which, in the House of Commons, he contrived to denounce his great rival as a liar, without infringing the etiquette of the House. I was on what is called or used to be called the "victim" turn that week. It was the duty of the victim to stay on in the gallery after all other members of his staff had left the House, and to watch proceedings until the Assembly was adjourned. On one occasion, I remember, I was on duty for seventy-two hours. That was when Parnell made his famous stand against the Government, and the Irish members went off in detachments to sleep at the Westminster Hotel and came back in detachments to keep the parliamentary ball a-rolling.

Disraeli's famous escapade was made on another occasion in the small hours of the morning and so far as I know I am the only surviving eye and ear witness of the occurrence. Shortly before the dinner hour on the preceding evening, somebody brought up from the lobby to the gallery the intelligence that Mr Disraeli had called for a pint of champagne, and that was taken to indicate his intention to make a speech. When Mr Gladstone was bent upon a great effort, he generally prepared himself for it by taking the yolk of an egg beaten up in a glass of sherry, Mr Bright's priming was said to be a glass of a particular old port, and there was a malicious whisper to the effect that Mr Lowe, whilst Chancellor of the Exchequer made ready to enter the oratorical arena by taking a glass of iced water at the bar, being moved to his choice of a stimulant by considerations of economy. Mr Disraeli then was reported to the gallery as having taken his half-bottle, and very shortly afterwards he slipped into the House from behind the Speaker's chair and assumed his accustomed seat. Some quite inconsiderable Member of the Conservative party was on his legs, and we all supposed that on his chiefs arrival he would bring his speech to a close. He prosed along, however, until the House adjourned for dinner, and Disraeli's opportunity was for the meantime lost. He left the House at the hour of adjournment and did not return until about one o'clock in the morning. When at last he rose, he entered upon a long tale which at first seemed to have no bearing whatever upon any business the House could possibly have in contemplation. "Mr Speaker, sir," he began, "it will be within the memory of many right honourable and honourable gentlemen, members of this House, that one of the most distinguished ornaments at an earlier period of its history was the late greatly lamented Sir Robert Peel. One of Sir Robert Peel's most intimate friends was Colonel Ellis, a less distinguished member of this Assembly. Colonel Ellis, sir, was a noted authority in all matters relating to gourmandising and his opinion was especially respected with regard to the quality of wines. At the time of which I speak, champagne was a liqueured and sugared beverage, mainly relegated to the use and for the enjoyment of the ladies."

The House sat in an amazed speculation as to whither the orator was being led by this extraordinary exordium, but Mr Disraeli flowed on unmoved.

"It happened that a friend upon the continent sent to Sir Robert Peel a case of dry champagne, a beverage then almost unknown in this country. Sir Robert invited Colonel Ellis to dine with him and to taste and to pronounce upon the novel beverage, and when the repast had been discussed, Sir Robert turned upon his guest and inquired of him, with a solemnity befitting the occasion: 'Pray, Colonel Ellis, what is your opinion of dry champagne?' To which Colonel Ellis, with a solemnity equal to Sir Robert's own, responded: 'I believe that the man who is capable of saying that he likes dry champagne, is capable of saying anything.' Now, sir, it is not within my purpose or my province to charge the right honourable gentleman who controls the destinies of the party opposite with tergiversation, but this I will say that, on my honour and my conscience, I believe that he is capable of declaring that he is fond of dry champagne!"

This astonishing sally was greeted with roars of laughter and cries of disapproval, neither of which moved the speaker in the least. The incident somehow remained unreported, but one can easily fancy the avidity with which it would have been pounced upon by the alerter journalism of modern days.

Mr Thomas Burt was the first working man to be returned to Parliament, where his sterling qualities of character and his unassuming and natural demeanour made a very favourable impression. But a year or two after his return, he was joined by a Labour representative who displayed the characteristics of altogether a different sort. For one thing, he was a vulgarly overdressed man, and he used to sprawl about the benches with outstretched arms, making his cry of condescending patronage heard in answer to any utterance of which he might approve from such inconsiderable persons as Gladstone or Harcourt or Forster. His "Hear, hear, hear," was the very essence of a self-satisfied and unconscious insolence. He was a man who would have patronised the angel Gabriel, and he was quite unconscious of his own offensiveness until he tried his hand upon Disraeli, when he found his level once for all and with a ludicrous swiftness.

He and Mr Burt had together backed a Bill which was intended to do something to ameliorate the condition of the coal-miners of this country, and at the annual slaughter of the innocents, Mr Disraeli announced that it was the intention of the Government to carry on the measure. The statement had already fallen from his lips and he had just entered on another sentence when the intolerable patronising voice broke in, "Hear, hear, hear," "Hear, hear hear," as if a very great personage with too great a consciousness of his own greatness were expressing his approval of the conduct of a little boy. Disraeli stopped dead short in his speech and one of the finest bits of comedy I can remember to have seen ensued. He closed his eyes and began very deliberately to fumble about the breast of his frock-coat within and without in search of something which he was evidently not over anxious to find. Alighting at last on the object of this perfunctory search he produced an eyeglass and, still with closed eyes, he lifted the skirt of his coat and polished the glass upon its silken lining. It began to occur to Mr Disraeli's patron that all this slow pantomime was in some way directed to his address. The House waited, with here and there a rather nervous expectant laugh. The Labour member, who was originally thrown abroad in his usual pompous fashion, began to shrivel. His widely-extended arms, which had been stretched along the top of the bench on which he sat, crept closer and closer to his sides. He shrank, he dwindled, he wilted like a leaf on a hot stove, and when Disraeli finally screwed his glass into his eye and, after surveying him for two or three dreadful seconds, allowed the glass to fall and resumed his speech at the very word at which he had broken off, the patron of the House was an altogether abject figure. The assembly literally rocked with laughter and Mr Burt's colleague never, never, never ventured to pat Mr Disraeli on the back again.

It does not fall to the lot of every self-sufficient ass who finds himself returned to Parliament and who imagines that he can at once make a figure in that assembly to learn his place in so abrupt a fashion, but there is no gathering in the world in which a man so inevitably finds his proper level. Poor Dr Kenealy had gifts enough to have carried him to a high place almost anywhere, but unfortunately for himself he came into the House in a mood of passionate defiance against the world. He chose to defy the rules of the Assembly at its very threshold. It has been the custom from time immemorial for a new member to be introduced by two gentlemen who are already officially known to Mr Speaker. I happened to be in the box apportioned to the Daily News when the Doctor attempted to evade this rule and to present himself before the Speaker without the customary credentials. He was of course forbidden to enter and after some unseemly altercation outside the bar, two members were found to volunteer to introduce him. He marched up the House with his umbrella in one hand and the certificate of the Returning Officer in the other, his eyes flashing a quite unnecessary defiance, poor gentleman, behind his gold-rimmed glasses, and his whole figure placed as if for instant combat. It was probably by an inadvertence that he hung his umbrella upon the Speaker's mace, but it was certainly counted as an act of intentional discourtesy against him. He was sent to Coventry from the first, and he was so sore and angry that he was almost fore-doomed to bring himself into trouble.