Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 11 August 1887.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, pp. 141–2).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Note: Unrecorded and unreprinted.

I make no complaint. I do not even blame Fate – that last scape-goat of the luckless. Indeed, to-day I have nothing to complain of; for I am accounted a rising man. There are those who consider me successful.

It was ordained that I should fight the battle of life early. A gap in the ranks offered itself; and I was thrust into it almost before I knew what had happened. The last words of counsel from those who had ordered my days were: “Pick up as you go along!”

On my conscience, worn and frayed as a bullock-trunk, I declare to you that sentence is the only education I have thoroughly taken into my system. My métier was “to pick up as I went along” and a vast lumberage of scrap-ends of knowledge, disconnected facts – all useless, unpacked and unavailable – are witnesses to the zeal with which I followed the advice of my elders. There was the line of battle – in front lay the smoke of the great Action of Life and – could I do anything else? – I went in. That year's draft of recruits moved forward. Had I desired it I could not have stepped back. I was a man fighting with and against men. I was “picking up as I went along.” Among the many dreams that vex a man in the night is one wherein he finds himself, clad in the scantiest of nightgear, thrust into a brawling street full of friends all decently dressed. You know the agony and shame of that dream? Imagine it translated into life – drawn out through year after year – and you may conceive the distress I have suffered and do still endure. My curtailed shift of knowledge, piece it out as I will, is for ever threatening to disclose the abject nakedness of my ignorance. I have patched it in a hundred places, but the patches show, the patches show, and my abiding fear is lest my well-clad comrades should notice the deficiency.