of age, who gloried in it. His
expletives were varied, vivid and inexhaustible, and the turbid stream
was easily set flowing. Had he lived a century earlier he might have
been put in the stocks for his profanity, a punishment which magistrates
were then, by Act of Parliament, empowered to inflict. He was a strange
individual. _Long Jack_ he was called. He is not in this world now so I
may write of him with freedom.

No one's enemy but his own, he was kindly, good-natured, generous to a
fault, but devil-may-care and reckless; and, at any one's expense, or at
any cost to himself, would have his fling and his joke.

It was from his lankiness and length of limb that he was called "_Long
Jack_." He stood about six feet six in his boots. He must have had
means of his own, as he lived in a way far beyond the reach of even a
senior clerk of the first degree. How he came to be in a railway office,
or, being in, retained his place, was a matter of wonder. Sad to tell,
he had a little daughter, five or six years of age; his only child, a
sweet, blue-eyed golden-haired little fairy, who, never corrected,
imitated her father's profanity, and apparently to his great delight. He
treated it as a joke, as he treated everything. _Long Jack_ loved to
scandalise the town by his eccentricities. He would compound with the
butcher, to drive his fast trotting horse and trap and deliver their
joints, their steaks and kidneys to astonished customers, or arrange with
the milkman to dispense the early morning milk, donning a milkman's
smock, and carrying two milk-pails on foot. I remember one _Good Friday_
morning when he perambulated the town with a donkey cart and sold, at an
early hour, hot cross buns at the houses of his friends, afterwards
gleefully boasting of having made a good profit on the morning's
business. In the sixties and early seventies throughout the clerical
staff of the Midland Railway were many who had not been brought up as
clerks, who, somehow or other had drifted into the service, whose early
avocations had been of various kinds, and whose appearance, habits and
manners imparted a picturesqueness to office life which does not exist to-
day, and among these. _Long Jack_ was a prominent, but despite his
joviality, it seems to me a pathetic figure.

CHAPTER VI.
FRIENDSHIP

Delicate health, as I have said, was my lot from childhood. After about
eighteen months of office work I had a long and serious i