grown up and would not pretend.

For some reason his end always reminds me of the closing line of
Pinero's play, when the adventuress, Mrs. Tanqueray, kills herself, and
her virtuous stepchild says: "If we had only been kinder!"

WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL

IN the strict sense of the phrase, a soldier of fortune is a man who for
pay, or for the love of adventure, fights under the flag of any country.

In the bigger sense he is the kind of man who in any walk of life makes
his own fortune, who, when he sees it coming, leaps to meet it, and
turns it to his advantage.

Than Winston Spencer Churchill to-day there are few young men--and he is
a very young man--who have met more varying fortunes, and none who has
more frequently bent them to his own advancement. To him it has been
indifferent whether, at the moment, the fortune seemed good or evil, in
the end always it was good.

As a boy officer, when other subalterns were playing polo, and at the
Gaiety Theatre attending night school, he ran away to Cuba and fought
with the Spaniards. For such a breach of military discipline, any other
officer would have been court-martialled. Even his friends feared that
by his foolishness his career in the army was at an end. Instead, his
escapade was made a question in the House of Commons, and the fact
brought him such publicity that the _Daily Graphic_ paid him handsomely
to write on the Cuban Revolution, and the Spanish Government rewarded
him with the Order of Military Merit.

At the very outbreak of the Boer war he was taken prisoner. It seemed
a climax of misfortune. With his brother officers he had hoped in that
campaign to acquit himself with credit, and that he should lie inactive
in Pretoria appeared a terrible calamity. To the others who, through
many heart-breaking months, suffered imprisonment, it continued to be
a calamity. But within six weeks of his capture Churchill escaped, and,
after many adventures, rejoined his own army to find that the calamity
had made him a hero.

When after the battle of Omdurman, in his book on "The River War," he
attacked Lord Kitchener, those who did not like him, and they were many,
said: "That's the end of Winston in the army. He'll never get another
chance to criticise K. of K."

But only two years later the chance came, when, no longer a subaltern,
but as a member of the House of Commons, he patronized Kitchener by
defending him from the attacks of others.

Later, when his