the clerk that there was always the devil in those mum
fellows; but they never called me Salvation after that.

"I am writing to you of very small things, but there is nothing else to
tell; it has been all small and you will like it. Whenever anything has
happened I have always thought I would tell it to you. The back thought
in my mind is always you. After that only one old man came to visit me.
I had seen him in the streets often; he always wore very dirty black
clothes, and a hat with crepe round it, and he had one eye, so I
noticed him. One day he came to my room with a subscription-list for
a minister's salary. When I said I had nothing to give he looked at me
with his one eye.

"'Young man,' he said, 'how is it I never see you in the house of the
Lord?' I thought he was trying to do good, so I felt sorry for him, and
I told him I never went to chapel. 'Young man,' he said, 'it grieves me
to hear such godless words from the lips of one so young--so far gone in
the paths of destruction. Young man, if you forget God, God will forget
you. There is a seat on the right-hand side as you go at the bottom door
that you may get. If you are given over to the enjoyment and frivolities
of this world, what will become of your never dying soul?'

"He would not go till I gave him half a crown for the minister's salary.
Afterward I heard he was the man who collected the pew rents and got a
percentage. I didn't get to know any one else.

"When my time in that shop was done I hired myself to drive one of a
transport-rider's wagons.

"That first morning, when I sat in the front and called to my oxen, and
saw nothing about me but the hills, with the blue coming down to them,
and the karoo bushes, I was drunk; I laughed; my heart was beating till
it hurt me. I shut my eyes tight, that when I opened them I might see
there were no shelves about me. There must be a beauty in buying and
selling, if there is beauty in everything: but it is very ugly to me. My
life as transport-rider would have been the best life in the world if I
had had only one wagon to drive. My master told me he would drive one, I
the other, and he would hire another person to drive the third. But the
first day I drove two to help him, and after that he let me drive all
three. Whenever we came to an hotel he stopped behind to get a drink,
and when he rode up to the wagons he could never stand; the Hottentot
and I used to lift him up. We always travelled all night, a