ch he scribbled anything
that struck him, recording scenes, conversations, impressions of books
and people. This he found was easy enough, but it seemed impossible to
complete anything, or to give it a finished form. However, he acquired
the habit of writing, and gained some facility of expression. His
short holidays were spent either in travel, with some like-minded
companion, or in his quiet country home, where he read a large number
of books, and lived much in the open air. But his progress seemed to
have been purely intellectual. He lost his interest in abstract
problems and in religious matters, which retired to a remote distance,
and appeared to him to be little more than a line of blue hills on a
distant horizon, as seen by a man who goes up and down in a city. He
had visited them once, those hills of hope, and he used to think
vaguely of visiting them again; but meanwhile the impulse and the
opportunity alike failed him.

Yet in another sense he did not consider those days lost. He gained,
he used to feel afterwards, a knowledge of the world, a knowledge of
men, a knowledge of affairs. This contact with realities took from his
somewhat dreamy and reflective temperament its unpractical quality. If
he chose afterwards to leave what is commonly called the world, it was
a deliberate choice, founded on a thorough knowledge of its conditions,
and not upon a timid and awkward ignorance. He did not leave the world
because it frightened or bewildered him, but because he did not find in
it the things of which he was in search. Neither, on the other hand,
did he quit the life of affairs like a weakling or an inefficient
person who had failed in it, and had persuaded himself that
incompetence was unworldliness. Hugh became a remarkably efficient
official, alert, sensible, practical, and prudent. He was marked out
for promotion. He was looked upon as a man who got on well with
inferiors and superiors alike, who could be trusted to do a complicated
piece of business well, who was worth consulting.

Moreover he acquired a very serviceable and lucid style, a power of
clear statement, which afterwards stood him in good stead. His
official work gave him the power of seeing the point, it gave him an
economy of words, an effective briskness and solidity of presentment;
at the same time his literary work prevented him from degenerating into
a mere precis-writer.

It is very difficult to say which of the days of a m