lately gone to his rest full of years and honors.

I fear he never liked me, nor had any great opinion of my abilities. This
was not to be wondered at, for I am sure I did not display any excessive
zeal for the work on which I was then employed, and which I found
monotonous and uninteresting.

He confided to his chief clerk, who was my friend, that one day he had
seen me, in business hours, in the city, smoking a cigarette and looking
at the girls, and was sure I would never do much good. He had very
strict business notions. I confessed to the cigarette, but not to the
graver charge. It was a wholesome tonic, however, and pulled me up. I
wanted to get on in life; ambition was stirring within me; and I formed
some good resolutions which, as time went on, I kept more or less
faithfully.

At St. Rollox one's daily lunch was a matter of some difficulty. It was
a district of factories, and the only restaurants were the Great Western
Cooking Depots, where one could get a steak and bread and cheese for
fivepence, but the rooms and tables and accessories were, to say the
least, unappetising. Hunger had to be satisfied, however, and I had to
swallow my pride and my five-pennyworth. I varied this occasionally by
bringing with me my own sandwiches and eating them seated on a tombstone
in Sighthill cemetery, which was less than a quarter of a mile distant
from the stores department.

My work, as I have said, was monotonous enough: writing letters from
dictation, an occupation which gave but little exercise to one's
faculties. I obtained some variation by occasionally taking a turn
through the various stores and getting into touch with the practical men
in charge. They were always very civil and ready to talk of their
business, and so I learned something of the nature, quality, uses and
cost of many things necessary to the working of a railway, which I
afterwards found very useful. Occasionally also I visited the
laboratory, in which an analytical chemist was regularly engaged.

The event which, in my short service of two years with the Caledonian,
seemed to me of the greatest moment, was that, after six months or so, I
became a taxpayer! This was an event indeed. In the offices at Derby it
was only, as a rule, middle-aged or old men who attained this proud
distinction; and here was I, not yet twenty-two, with my salary raised to
100 pounds a year, paying income tax at the rate of _threepence_ in the
pound on fort