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lately gone to his rest full of years and honors. I fear he never liked me, nor had any great opinion of my abilities. This was not to be wondered at, for I am sure I did not display any excessive zeal for the work on which I was then employed, and which I found monotonous and uninteresting. He confided to his chief clerk, who was my friend, that one day he had seen me, in business hours, in the city, smoking a cigarette and looking at the girls, and was sure I would never do much good. He had very strict business notions. I confessed to the cigarette, but not to the graver charge. It was a wholesome tonic, however, and pulled me up. I wanted to get on in life; ambition was stirring within me; and I formed some good resolutions which, as time went on, I kept more or less faithfully. At St. Rollox one's daily lunch was a matter of some difficulty. It was a district of factories, and the only restaurants were the Great Western Cooking Depots, where one could get a steak and bread and cheese for fivepence, but the rooms and tables and accessories were, to say the least, unappetising. Hunger had to be satisfied, however, and I had to swallow my pride and my five-pennyworth. I varied this occasionally by bringing with me my own sandwiches and eating them seated on a tombstone in Sighthill cemetery, which was less than a quarter of a mile distant from the stores department. My work, as I have said, was monotonous enough: writing letters from dictation, an occupation which gave but little exercise to one's faculties. I obtained some variation by occasionally taking a turn through the various stores and getting into touch with the practical men in charge. They were always very civil and ready to talk of their business, and so I learned something of the nature, quality, uses and cost of many things necessary to the working of a railway, which I afterwards found very useful. Occasionally also I visited the laboratory, in which an analytical chemist was regularly engaged. The event which, in my short service of two years with the Caledonian, seemed to me of the greatest moment, was that, after six months or so, I became a taxpayer! This was an event indeed. In the offices at Derby it was only, as a rule, middle-aged or old men who attained this proud distinction; and here was I, not yet twenty-two, with my salary raised to 100 pounds a year, paying income tax at the rate of _threepence_ in the pound on fort
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