“Kck,” he repeated. “He’s dead.” “You don’t say so?” I cried. “What did he die of?” For some seconds he was unable to speak, obviously struggling with his vocal cords, and then with a blast of exceptional sadness he managed to expel the mournful details. Suffering, as it appeared, from a temporary gastric distention, the amiable lad had gone to the medicine chest, where he had unfortunately mistaken the cyanide of potassium for the bicarbonate of soda. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER X Precautionary measures on entering commercial life. I join the _N.S.L._ and the _S.P.S.D.T._ A crying need in the conduct of prayer-meetings. I join the _A.D.S.U._ Personal appearance of Ezekiel Stool. Personal appearance of his five sisters. Predicament of Ezekiel Stool on the fifth of November. A timely instance of presence of mind. I am invited to a meal at the Stools’ residence. A foreshadowing of sinister events. IT was a distressing end. Few things are more distressing, indeed, than the sudden demise of a potential clergyman. And for the first three or four days of my work in Paternoster Row my spirits were appreciably clouded. Nevertheless I was happy not only that I had embarked upon the career so satisfactorily chosen for me, but also in the consciousness that, but for my own perspicacity, Providence would have found it difficult to assist me. Moreover it was an additional comfort to me to reflect that, during my upward progress in the firm, I should have the obligatory if unwilling support of Mrs. Chrysostom Lorton. A word in the ear of her husband, and her infamy could be no longer concealed, and I could not suppose that, callous as she was, she would dare to expose herself to such an event. Few young men, therefore, can have entered business life better equipped or so advantageously placed, and had I in consequence been carried away a little, it would scarcely perhaps have been unnatural. Very fortunately, however, and thanks in a great degree to the character-forming incidents already related, I realized from the outset that I was now definitely committed to the most critical period of a young man’s life—namely, the years, so fatal to the vast majority, between his seventeenth and twenty-fourth birthdays. Then it is, alas, that intoxicated with the knowledge that he has become, in my father’s phrase, a marriageable adult that he begins to resort for the first time to the tobacconist and the publican—to buy the cigarette that will so inevitably lure him into loose and licentious company, and the fermented liquor that will only too surely encase him in a drunkard’s coffin.