brogue brought me several Irish nicknames which irritated me. They
were names usually attached to the Roman Catholic Irish, and having
been brought up in an Ulster community, where part of a boy's
education is to hate Roman Catholics, I naturally resented these
names. A Protestant Irishman will tolerate "Pat," but "Mick" will put
him in a fighting attitude in a moment. The only way out of the
difficulty was to rid myself of the brogue, and this I proceeded to
do.

All around me were cockney Englishmen, murdering the Queen's English,
and Scotchmen who were doing worse. I had not yet become the possessor
of a dictionary, and my chief instructors in language, and
particularly pronunciation and enunciation, were preachers and
lecturers.

With regard to literature, I was like a man lost in a forest. I had no
guide. One night I attended a lecture by Dr. J.W. Kirton, the author
of a tract called, "Buy Your Own Cherries." This tract my mother had
read to me when a boy, and it had made a very profound impression upon
me. The author was very kind, gave me an interview, and advised me to
read as my first novel, "John Halifax, Gentleman." Inside of a week I
had read the book twice, the second time with dictionary, and pencil.
The story fascinated me, and the way in which it was told opened up
new channels of improvement. I memorized whole pages of it, and even
took long walks by the seaside repeating over and over what I had
memorized.

The enlargement of my opportunities in garrison life revealed to me
something of the amount of work required to accomplish my purpose. In
the midst of people who had merely an ordinary grammar school