Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own career.
'I do not suppose,' he said, 'that any man in my present position has experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I slept in the Park.'
One of the party turned to me. 'You cap that, Christie?'
I answered, 'Four nights on the Embankment. Four days hungry.'
My left-hand neighbour was a poet, and he chimed in laconically, 'Five.'
In effect, it proved that there was not one of us who had not slept in that Hotel of the Beautiful Star which is always open to everybody. We had all been frequent guests there, and now we were all prosperous, and had found other and more comfortable lodgings. There is a gentler brotherhood to be found among men who have put up in that great caravanserai than can be looked for elsewhere. He jests at scars that never felt a wound, and a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.
There are many people still alive who remember the name of George Dawson. There used to be thousands who recognized it with veneration and affection. He was my first chief, editor of the _Birmingham Morning News_, and had been my idol for years. My red-letter nights were when he came over to my native town of West Bromwich to lecture for the Young Men's Christian Association there on Tennyson, 'Vanity Fair,' Oliver Goldsmith, and kindred themes.
Every Sunday night it was my habit to tramp with a friend of mine, dead long ago, into Birmingham to hear Dawson preach in the Church of the Saviour. The trains ran awkwardly for us, and many scores of times poor Ned and myself walked the five miles out and five miles home in rain and snow and summer weather to listen to the helpful and inspiriting words of the strongest and most helpful man I have ever known.
I am not sure at this time of day what I should think of George Dawson if he still survived; but nothing can now diminish the affection and reverence with which I bless his memory. I had been writing prose and verse for the local journals for a year or two. I was proud and pleased beyond expression to be allowed to write the political leaders for the _Wednesday Advertiser_. I got no pay, and I dare say the editor was as pleased to find an enthusiast who did his work for nothing as I was to be allowed to do it. In practical journalism I had had no experience whatever; but when Dawson was announced as the editor of the forthcoming _Birmingham Morning News_ I wrote to him, asking to be allowed to join the staff. I had already secured a single meeting with him a year before, and he had spoken not unkindly of some juvenile verses which I had dared to submit to his judgment