hen
our article appeared in an evening paper. The promptitude with
which I counted the lines to see how much we should get for it.
Then M'Connachie's superb air of dropping it into the gutter.
Oh, to be a free lance of journalism again--that darling jade!
Those were days. Too good to last. Let us be grave. Here comes
a Rector.

But now, on reflection, a dreadful sinking assails me, that this was
not really work. The artistic callings--you remember how Stevenson
thumped them--are merely doing what you are clamorous to be at;
it is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.
My so-called labours were just M'Connachie running away with me again.
Still, I have sometimes worked; for instance, I feel that I am
working at this moment. And the big guns are in the same plight
as the little ones. Carlyle, the king of all rectors, has always
been accepted as the arch-apostle of toil, and has registered his
many woes. But it will not do. Despite sickness, poortith, want
and all, he was grinding all his life at the one job he revelled in.
An extraordinarily happy man, though there is no direct proof that
he thought so.

There must be many men in other callings besides the arts lauded
as hard workers who are merely out for enjoyment. Our Chancellor?
(indicating Lord Haig). If our Chancellor has always a passion
to be a soldier, we must reconsider him as a worker. Even our
Principal? How about the light that burns in our Principal's
room after decent people have gone to bed? If we could climb up
and look in--I should like to do something of that kind for the
last time--should we find him engaged in honest toil, or guiltily
engrossed in chemistry?

You will all fall into one of those two callings, the joyous or the
uncongenial; and one wishes you into the first, though our sympathy,
our esteem, must go rather to the less fortunate, the braver ones
who 'turn their necessity to glorious gain' after they have put away
their dreams. To the others will go the easy prizes of life,
success, which has become a somewhat odious onion nowadays, chiefly
because we so often give the name to the wrong thing. When you
reach the evening of your days you will, I think, see--with, I hope,
becoming cheerfulness--that we are all failures, at least all the
best of us. The greatest Scotsman that ever lived wrote himself
down a failure:

'The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know
And k