Upon an unfavorable construction I could claim to be middle-aged at
forty; and I was prepared to live abroad in the unlikely event of any
one fixing upon a country which could be properly called "abroad" from
the standpoint of a man who had not spent twelve consecutive months in
any place since he was fifteen years old.
As for intelligence, I reflected that for ninety-nine people out of a
hundred intelligence in others means no more than the discovery of a
person who is in intellectual acquiescence with themselves, and that if
the necessity arose I could probably affect an acquiescence which would
serve all the purposes of a fundamental identity of convictions.
Two things, however, suggested possible difficulties, the questions of
what interpretations the advertiser placed upon the terms "widely read"
and "good salary." I could not claim to be widely read in any
conventional sense, for I was not a university graduate, and the very
extensive reading I had done in my special line of study--the control
and development of tropical dependencies--though it might entitle me to
some consideration as a student in that field had left me woefully
ignorant of general literature. Would the ability to discuss with
intelligence the Bengal Regulation of 1818, or the British Guiana
Immigration Ordinance of 1891 be welcomed as a set-off to a complete
unfamiliarity with Milton's "Comus" and Gladstone's essay on the
epithets of motion in Homer?
On the subject of what constituted a "good salary" experience had taught
me to expect a very wide divergence of view, not only along the natural
line of cleavage between the person paying and the person receiving the
salary, but also between one employer and another and between one
employee and another; and I recalled a story, told me in my infancy, in
which a certain British laboring man had been heard to remark that he
would not be the Czar of Russia, no, not for thirty shillings a week.
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