It is also said that one of his schoolmasters saw signs of future greatness in the dullard of whom neither he nor any of his brethren could make even a presentable schoolboy, but this is probably a story of the “I told you so” order, possibly invented by the worthy pedagogue some time after the event. Be this, however, as it may, the fact is that in the end the last of the pedagogues seems to have thrown the job up in despair and returned him back on his father’s hands as a hopelessly hard case. Now it so happened that in those days there was a refuge for the destitute, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the ne’er-do-well, which in these days is hardly represented by any portion of our Colonial Empire. If there appeared to be no chance of a lad doing anything decent at home; if his parents were too poor to buy him a commission in the Army, and hadn’t interest enough to get him into the Navy, and if he were, as Clive undoubtedly was, too much of a dunce to have a chance in any other respectable profession, the last thing that could be done for him was to get him a writership in the service of the East India Company. If this could be done, two prospects were open to him. He would die of fever in a year or two, after a hard struggle to live upon his miserable pay, or he would “shake the Pagoda Tree,” and come home a wealthy nabob, with a brick-dust complexion, a sun-dried and somewhat shrivelled conscience, and a liver perpetually on strike. As it happened, however, Robert Clive availed himself of neither of these prospects, since the mysterious Fates had a third one in store for him. Certainly they were _very_ mysterious Fates which presided over the early fortunes of the future Conqueror of India, and upon none of their darlings have they frowned so blackly and then suddenly turned round and smiled so brightly as upon the scapegrace of Market Drayton. To begin with, the voyage to India in those days, even for people with large means, was a weary and miserable business. Ocean greyhounds, the Suez Canal, and the Peninsular Railway, were undreamt of; and the heavy Indiamen lumbered toilfully round the Cape, across the Indian Ocean, and up the Bay of Bengal, taking their time about it--sometimes six months, sometimes a year, or more. In Clive’s case it was more, for his ship first crossed the Atlantic to the Brazils, and stopped there for some months. Here he spent all his money, and got in return a smattering of Portuguese, which he afterwards found useful. When he eventually landed on the surf-beaten beach of Madras, he was not only penniless but in debt. The only person of influence to whom he had an introduction had left for England. His duties were both laborious and distasteful. He had no friends and was too shy and awkwardly proud to make any, and for months he was veritably a stranger in a strange land, and, to crown all, he became wretchedly ill.