Then came the great and momentous change at forty-two of resigning my two-pound-a-week clerkship and embarking upon the stormy sea of journalism and authorship. Late, very late in life, and indeed too late to give me much joy, for the iron of poverty and struggle, of scorn and failure had entered into my very soul. And to crown all, my youngest son, my Benjamin, had died on the very day that my first book was accepted. But such joy as I could feel I did. All my new acquaintances and friends bade me welcome, helped me, said nice things about me, and I earned a good deal of money. I paid all my debts and enjoyed to the full what I had long sighed for, the power to pay cash for everything as I received it, and the full determination that if possible to do so should always be my rule while I lived. Most gratefully do I declare that so far that rule has been realised.
But the change was easy, I felt no strangeness about it any more than I had ever done since the first. And yet it was as great a change as a man could well experience and live. Now, however, I have come to another change which I feel is the final one, except, of course, the closing of the book to which all of us must come. And as through this month of November I sit by my fireside I do feel as I have never done before, a sense of loss, of having looked my last upon the multitude of friends I made while lecturing. I find myself recalling the upturned faces in their serried rows, the bursts of applause, the involuntary remarks made by some enthusiastic listener, the sense of power for good in that I was interesting and amusing many of my fellow-creatures by whom I should be remembered for many and many a day. Yes, even to their lives’ end, for although thirty years have passed since I heard J. Jackson Wray lecture, his image, his voice, his words are all as vivid to me now as they were on that night in Sutherland Gardens Chapel when I sat entranced to hear him.
And in like manner my heart has been rejoiced to be greeted in Australia, in South America, in India, in Canada, by some friendly voice telling me of keen recollections of my lecture at some place or another long before. Now I often sit and think with mellow happiness that scattered all over the world there are people who are thinking kindly of me to-night as of one who spoke words to them pleasant to recall, and the thought does in some measure compensate me for my very great loss.
Yes, this is the greatest change of all, and the hardest to bear, and that is principally why I have again taken up my now seldom used pen, to recall and set down many of the well-remembered incidents of my life and to bid all who loved me and knew me as a lecturer a quiet but tender
FAREWELL
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Transcriber’s Notes
In a few cases, obvious errors in punctuation and spelling have been fixed.
[Page 299]: “interesting you you so much” changed to “interesting you so much”