His Grace — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HIS GRACE. 4 that’s all. I am not making any complaint, mind you ; only, if I were in your place, I should drop the law and try to discover my real mission in life. As I said be- fore, [ am not clever enough to assist you in your researches ; still, the odds are that you have a mission of one kind or another, because it seems scarcely reasonable to conclude that you can have been sent into an overcrowded world without any individual capacity for usefulness whatsoever.” It was not often that my uncle treated me to so pro- longed a harangue; nor, I am sure, would he have done so then, had he not been very much in earnest and rather angry into the bargain. He had some ex- cuses for being angry with which it is needless to trouble the reader ; he was perfectly justified in intimating that I was not cut out to adorn a profession which I have always abhorred ; his advice that I should abandon it and seek some other field of enterprise would have been admirable, if I had possessed ever so small a pri- vate income upon which to subsist while awaiting better things. But, unhappily, I had nothing beyond what my mother was able to spare me out of her own strait- ened means; and that was why I was a sorrowful man as I wended my way westwards after office hours. When I sat down to write this narrative, I made up my mind that I would say as little as possible about myself ; because in the course of it I shall only appear as what I actually am—a practical nonentity, whose disappearance at any moment from these earthly scenes would cause no appreciable inconvenience to anybody. But the difficulty of speaking in the first person when one is neither a hero nor anything resembling one is somewhat greater than I thought it was going to be; com l = \ aL oYeye) CS (E(o) im