y pounds, for an abatement of sixty pounds was allowed.
Until I got used to the novelty I was as proud as Lucifer.

The office in which I now worked had no Apollos, no literary geniuses, no
Long Jacks, no boy benedicts, such as adorned our desks at Derby, but it
rejoiced in one _rara avis_, who came a few months after and left a few
months before me. He was a middle-aged, aristocratic, kind,
good-hearted, unbusinesslike man, and was brother to a baronet. He
professed a knowledge of medicine and brought a bottle, a bolus or a
plaster, whichever he deemed best, whenever any of us complained of cold
or cough, of headache or backache or any ailment whatever. When he left
we all received from him a parting gift. Mine was a handsome, expensive,
red-felt chest protector. I wore it constantly for a year or two and,
for aught I know, it may be that by its protecting influence against the
rigour of Glasgow winters, the bituminous atmosphere of St. Rollox and
the smoke-charged fogs of the city, I am alive and well to-day. Who can
tell? It is certain that I then had a bad cough nearly always; and this
I am sure was what decided the form of his parting gift to me.

It was about this time that I attended my first public dinner and made my
first speech in public. Several days before the event I was told that,
being in the Volunteer Force, I had been placed on the toast list to
reply for the Army, Navy and Volunteers. It was a railway dinner, for
the purpose of celebrating the departure to England, on promotion, of the
chief clerk in the Midland Railway Company's Scottish Agency Office. The
dinner was largely attended. The idea of having to speak filled me with
trepidation. But to my great surprise I acquitted myself with credit.
Once on my legs I found that nervousness left me, words came freely and I
even enjoyed the novel experience. To suddenly discover oneself
proficient where failure had been feared increases self esteem and adds
to the sum of happiness. At this dinner I also made my first
acquaintance with that "Great chieftain o' the puddin' race," the
_Haggis_, which deserves the pre-eminence it enjoys.

One night, towards the end of December, in 1874, when skating by
moonlight, not far from Cambuslang, I chanced to meet a young friend, a
clerk in the Glasgow and South-Western Railway, who, like myself, was
enjoying the pleasures of the ice. Tom was not with me, for he, poor
fellow! was not well enough to be ou