of age the whole scheme of your life; but my illness, and other
happenings of a highly disagreeable character, had compelled me to
abandon a career to which I had devoted twenty years of arduous labor;
and the question which pressed for an immediate answer was: What are you
going to do now?

Various alternatives presented themselves. There had been a suggestion
that I should take the editorship of a newspaper in Calcutta; an
important financial house in London had offered me the direction of its
interests in Western Canada; a post in the service of the Government of
India had been mentioned as a possibility by certain persons in
authority.

My own inclination, the child of a weary spirit and of the lassitude of
ill health, swayed me in the direction of a quiet retreat in Barbados,
that peaceful island of an eternal summer cooled by the northeast
trades, where the rush and turmoil of modern life are unknown and where
a very modest income more than suffices for all the needs of a simple
existence.

I shall never know to what issue my reflections upon these matters would
have led me, for a circumstance, in the last degree trivial, intervened
to turn my thoughts into an entirely new channel, and to guide me,
though I could not know it at the time, into the service of Joseph
Pulitzer.

My waiter was extremely busy serving a large party of artillery officers
at an adjoining table. I glanced through The Times and the Hamburger
Nachrichten, looked out for a while upon the crowded street, and then,
resigning myself to the delay in getting my lunch, picked up The Times