Early in 1882 I was drafted to headquarters near London—­a trained soldier.  My forenoons were spent in parades, drills, fatigue and other duties.  In the afternoons I continued my studies.  I entered into religious work with renewed vigour, connecting myself with a small independent church not far from the barracks.  My thick Irish brogue militated against my usefulness in the church, and in expressing myself with warmth, I usually made it worse.  In the barrack-room, my brogue brought me several Irish nicknames which irritated me.  They were names usually attached to the Roman Catholic Irish, and having been brought up in an Ulster community, where part of a boy’s education is to hate Roman Catholics, I naturally resented these names.  A Protestant Irishman will tolerate “Pat,” but “Mick” will put him in a fighting attitude in a moment.  The only way out of the difficulty was to rid myself of the brogue, and this I proceeded to do.

All around me were cockney Englishmen, murdering the Queen’s English, and Scotchmen who were doing worse.  I had not yet become the possessor of a dictionary, and my chief instructors in language, and particularly pronunciation and enunciation, were preachers and lecturers.

With regard to literature, I was like a man lost in a forest.  I had no guide.  One night I attended a lecture by Dr. J.W.  Kirton, the author of a tract called, “Buy Your Own Cherries.”  This tract my mother had read to me when a boy, and it had made a very profound impression upon me.  The author was very kind, gave me an interview, and advised me to read as my first novel, “John Halifax, Gentleman.”  Inside of a week I had read the book twice, the second time with dictionary, and pencil.  The story fascinated me, and the way in which it was told opened up new channels of improvement.  I memorized whole pages of it, and even took long walks by the seaside repeating over and over what I had memorized.

The enlargement of my opportunities in garrison life revealed to me something of the amount of work required to accomplish my purpose.  In the midst of people who had merely an ordinary grammar school education, I felt like a child.  When discouragement came, I took refuge in the fact that several avenues of usefulness were open to me in army life.  I had shown some proficiency in gunnery.  For a steady plodder who attends strictly to business there is always promotion.  As a flunky, there was the incentive of double pay, the wearing of plain clothes, and some intimate touch with the aristocracy.  Many a time one of these avenues seemed the only career open for me.  I hardly knew what an education meant; but, whatever it meant, it was a long way off and almost out of reach.  One day in going over my well-marked “John Halifax,” I came across this passage: 

  “’What would you do, John, if you were shut up here, and had to
  get over the yew hedge?  You could not climb it.’

  “‘I know that, and therefore I should not waste time in trying.’