advertise their paper.

Certainly it was astonishingly good luck for a "commencing journalist"
to bring down two birds with two articles, _i.e._, to hit one of
his own editors with one article, and to bag a Cabinet Minister with the
other.

No doubt the perfectly cautious man would have said, "This is an
accident, a mere coincidence, it means nothing and will never happen
again." Fortunately people do not argue in that rational and statistical
spirit. All my chiefs knew or cared was that I had written good stuff
and on a very technical subject, and that I had caught the ear of the
man who, considering the subject, most mattered--the Secretary of State
for the Colonies.

Anyway, my two first trial leaders had done the trick and I was from
that moment free of _The Spectator_. Townsend's holiday succeeded
to Hutton's, and when the holidays were over, including my own, which
not unnaturally took me to Venice,--"_Italiam petimus_" should
always be the motto of an English youth,--I returned to take up the
position of a weekly leader-writer and holiday-understudy, a mixed post
which by the irony of fate, as I have already said, had just been
vacated by Mr. Asquith. Here was an adventure indeed, and I can say
again with perfect sincerity that for me the greatest delight of the
whole thing was this element of the Romantic.

I was quite sensible that I had had the devil's own luck in my capture
of a post on _The Spectator_. Indeed, I very much preferred that,
to the thought that the good fortune that was mine was the reward of a
grinding and ignoble perseverance. I was in no mood for the drab