he had a little daughter, five or six years of age; his only child, a
sweet, blue-eyed golden-haired little fairy, who, never corrected,
imitated her father's profanity, and apparently to his great delight. He
treated it as a joke, as he treated everything. _Long Jack_ loved to
scandalise the town by his eccentricities. He would compound with the
butcher, to drive his fast trotting horse and trap and deliver their
joints, their steaks and kidneys to astonished customers, or arrange with
the milkman to dispense the early morning milk, donning a milkman's
smock, and carrying two milk-pails on foot. I remember one _Good Friday_
morning when he perambulated the town with a donkey cart and sold, at an
early hour, hot cross buns at the houses of his friends, afterwards
gleefully boasting of having made a good profit on the morning's
business. In the sixties and early seventies throughout the clerical
staff of the Midland Railway were many who had not been brought up as
clerks, who, somehow or other had drifted into the service, whose early
avocations had been of various kinds, and whose appearance, habits and
manners imparted a picturesqueness to office life which does not exist to-
day, and among these. _Long Jack_ was a prominent, but despite his
joviality, it seems to me a pathetic figure.




CHAPTER VI.
FRIENDSHIP


Delicate health, as I have said, was my lot from childhood. After about
eighteen months of office work I had a long and serious illness and was
away from duty for nearly half a year. The latter part of the time I