profound and all-pervading reigned. I had been talking, as an old
pensioner will talk, of byegone times, of my experiences in a long
railway career, and my companion, himself a rising railway man, seemed
greatly interested. As we sauntered along, the conversation now and
again lapsing into a companionable silence, he suddenly said: "Why don't
you write your reminiscences? They would be very interesting, not only
to us younger railway men, but to men of your own time too." Until that
moment I had never seriously thought of putting my reminiscences on
record, but my friend's words fell on favourable ground, and now, less
than a month since that night in Donegal, I am sitting at my desk penning
these opening lines.

That my undertaking will not be an easy one I know. My memory is well
stored, but unfortunately I have never kept a diary or commonplace book
of any kind. On the contrary a love of order and neatness, carried to
absurd excess, has always led me to destroy accumulated letters or
documents, and much that would be useful now has in the past, from time
to time, been destroyed and "cast as rubbish to the void."

Most autobiographies, I suppose, are undertaken to please the writers.
That this is the case with me I frankly confess; but I hope that what I
find much pleasure in writing my readers may, at least, find some
satisfaction in reading. Vanity, perhaps, plays some part in this hope,
for, "He that is pleased with himself easily imagines that he shall
please others."

Carlyle says, "A true delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of
pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man; that
all men are to an unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange
emblem of every man's; and that human portraits, faithfully drawn, are of