opened a pleasing prospect of attractive and interesting work, brightened
by the beams of youthful hope and awakened ambition. I was now chief
clerk to a general manager. Was it to be wondered at that I felt proud
and elated if also a little scared as to how I should get on.

Mr. Wainwright assumed the office of general manager on the first day of
the year. I say _office_, but in fact a general manager's office
scarcely existed. His predecessor, Mr. Johnstone, a capable but in some
respects a singular man, performed his managerial duties without an
office staff, wrote all his own letters, and not only wrote them but
first carefully drafted them out in a hand minute almost as Jonathan
Swift's. A strenuous worker, Mr. Johnstone, like most men who have no
hobby, did not long survive his retirement from active business life.

Mr. Wainwright, who, like myself, was born in Sheffield, was twenty-three
years my senior. His early railway life was passed in the Manchester,
Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (now the Great Central), of which the
redoubtable Mr. (afterwards Sir) Edward Watkin was then the lively
general manager.

A different man to his predecessor was Mr. Wainwright. Unlike Mr.
Johnstone he was modern and progressive. _He_ never scorned delights or
loved, for their own sake, laborious days; pleasure to him was as welcome
as sunshine; and work he made a pleasure.

As I have said, no general manager's _office_ existed. Of systematic
managerial supervision there was none. What was to be done? Something
certainly, and soon. Mr. Wainwright concurred in a suggestion I made
that I should visit Derby, see the general manager's office of the
Midland there, and learn how it was conducted. This I did. E. W. Wells,