I was barman in a hotel on the Portsmouth Road, and I put in a black month driving a taxicab in the city of London.

For a while I was the accredited correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and used to go with the rest of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries of State and War Office generals.

They censored my stuff so cruel that the paper fired me.

Then I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a fortnight in a little farm in Suffolk.

By and by I came back to Claridge's and this bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.
'I had learned,' he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes on me, 'that the British working-man is about the soundest piece of humanity on God's earth.