welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had
useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal
fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious,
egoistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and
more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent
services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life with
less design than myself. Never have I given a thought to the advantage
that might accrue from being on terms of friendship with this man and
avoiding that one. "Then how do you explain," cries the angry reader,
"that you have never had a friend by whom you did not profit? You must
have had very few friends." On the contrary, I have had many friends,
and of all sorts and kinds--men and women: and, I repeat, none took part
in my life who did not contribute something towards my well-being. It
must, of course, be understood that I make no distinction between mental
and material help; and in my case the one has at all times been adjuvant
to the other. "Pooh, pooh!" again exclaims the reader; "I for one will
not believe that chance has only sent across your way the people who
were required to assist you." Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing
as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning
to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it
may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened
up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of--what? Of the
Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the
general question, by replying to your taunt: Chance, or the conditions
of life under which we live, sent, of course, thousands of creatures
across my way who were powerless to benefit me; but then an instinct of
which I knew nothing, of which I was not even conscious, withdrew me
from them, and I was attracted to others. Have you not seen a horse
suddenly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage further away?