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 kn