Only four years ago, on a very memorable occasion in my life, I sat side by side with one of my old officers. He assured me, with every appearance of gravity, that if I had stayed much longer I should have disintegrated the regiment. I was sure, on the other hand, that the regiment would have disintegrated me; and though I was smart enough and willing enough to have made a good soldier at the beginning, I was too angry at stupidity and injustice to care to please anybody any longer. I knew one man who, having been gently nurtured, found himself suddenly thrown upon his own resources. He enlisted with a full determination to rise. When I last heard of him, years ago, he held brevet rank in another regiment; but I know what slights he endured, to what numberless insults he submitted, and how harsh and cruel the pathway to success was made for him at the beginning. They tell me things are better now, and I hope with all my heart they may be. As I knew the ranks they were made well-nigh intolerable for any well-educated youngster who showed a disposition to get on. V Thousands of people remember the excitement created five or six years ago by the story of the Missing Journalist. Scores still cherish the memory of poor MacNeill and think of him as amongst the cheeriest, friendliest, and most helpful of men. He was a delightful fellow and a good fellow; but he had a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and blameless life. He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone. He was unusually radiant and assured, and 'At last, at last,' he said, 'I've got my foot on the neck of this big London!' The triumphant phrase set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money to back him, and no reputation to begin with.