My work, as I have said, was monotonous enough:  writing letters from dictation, an occupation which gave but little exercise to one’s faculties.  I obtained some variation by occasionally taking a turn through the various stores and getting into touch with the practical men in charge.  They were always very civil and ready to talk of their business, and so I learned something of the nature, quality, uses and cost of many things necessary to the working of a railway, which I afterwards found very useful.  Occasionally also I visited the laboratory, in which an analytical chemist was regularly engaged.

The event which, in my short service of two years with the Caledonian, seemed to me of the greatest moment, was that, after six months or so, I became a taxpayer!  This was an event indeed.  In the offices at Derby it was only, as a rule, middle-aged or old men who attained this proud distinction; and here was I, not yet twenty-two, with my salary raised to 100 pounds a year, paying income tax at the rate of threepence in the pound on forty pounds, for an abatement of sixty pounds was allowed.  Until I got used to the novelty I was as proud as Lucifer.

The office in which I now worked had no Apollos, no literary geniuses, no Long Jacks, no boy benedicts, such as adorned our desks at Derby, but it rejoiced in one rara avis, who came a few months after and left a few months before me.  He was a middle-aged, aristocratic, kind, good-hearted, unbusinesslike man, and was brother to a baronet.  He professed a knowledge of medicine and brought a bottle, a bolus or a plaster, whichever he deemed best, whenever any of us complained of cold or cough, of headache or backache or any ailment whatever.  When he left we all received from him a parting gift.  Mine was a handsome, expensive, red-felt chest protector.  I wore it constantly for a year or two and, for aught I know, it may be that by its protecting influence against the rigour of Glasgow winters, the bituminous atmosphere of St. Rollox and the smoke-charged fogs of the city, I am alive and well to-day.  Who can tell?  It is certain that I then had a bad cough nearly always; and this I am sure was what decided the form of his parting gift to me.

It was about this time that I attended my first public dinner and made my first speech in public.  Several days before the event I was told that, being in the Volunteer Force, I had been placed on the toast list to reply for the Army, Navy and Volunteers.  It was a railway dinner, for the purpose of celebrating the departure to England, on promotion, of the chief clerk in the Midland Railway Company’s Scottish Agency Office.  The dinner was largely attended.  The idea of having to speak filled me with trepidation.  But to my great surprise I acquitted myself with credit.  Once on my legs I found that nervousness left me, words came freely and I even enjoyed the novel experience.  To suddenly discover oneself proficient where failure had been feared increases self esteem and adds to the sum of happiness.  At this dinner I also made my first acquaintance with that “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race,” the Haggis, which deserves the pre-eminence it enjoys.