sted 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