The Scottish Wholesale is an enormous business in these days, with a turnover of a hundred million dollars a year. When I was on its payroll, and very proud of my job, the office force, I think, was ten. Of course, there were no telephones or typewriters. The treasurer was a machinist at Thompson’s, on Finneston street. It was part of my duty to carry the check book to him, to get batches of checks signed. My first responsibility for observing a time-table schedule was impressed upon me rather interestingly by the Wholesale Co-operative’s first manager, Mr. James Borrowman. “Noo, laddie,” he said, as I was off to the treasurer with cheques to be signed, “Hoo soon d’ye think ye can be back wi’ the signatures?” I gave a close estimate, kept within it--and later discerned that my astute chief had made me set my own speed, below which it was quite inexpedient to fall. The office work was light enough to permit of a few observations on the methods of what was then very high commerce indeed. Tea-tasting, I remember, was a subject of absorbing interest--perhaps it had something to do with the application for a clerkship on a Ceylon plantation. There was almost sacramental gravity about old George’s preparations for testing the tasting and blending qualities of Oolong and Souchong. No home brew of these fantastic days is elaborated more carefully than the liquid bouquets in Madeira Court were compounded. With great respect to competent housewives, one may be allowed to remark that heating the pot before infusing the tea is not enough to bring to the human senses all the aromatic marvels of an artistic cup of tea. There is a delicate science of perfumery in the perfect production of the most cheering beverage. To induce a truly exquisite bouquet the cup must be heated before the tea is poured into it--and then, indeed, you have a liquid meet for the gods. Less than a dollar a week, with railway and restaurant expenses to be paid out of it, though the hours were only from nine to six, could not long satisfy the son of the Thornliebank co-operative treasurer. After about nine months at Madeira Court the post of junior assistant to the Kennishead stationmaster fell vacant, and I was the successful applicant for the position. “Junior assistant to the stationmaster” is as big-sounding a title as one can think of for that post, after many years’ diplomatic strain in trying to find titles for railway officials whose deserts, occasionally, were in inverse ratio to their appraisals of them.