Excerpt from Looking for Luck, the Life Story of a Rolling Stone One morning in the spring of 1895 I was behind the counter of my father's shop, as usual, when a grizzled, bearded man of about forty walked in and bade me good-morning. That was how it all started. I was rising sixteen at the time and clerk-book-keeper-head-salesman and errand-boy to my father who owned a little drapery and general stores in William Street, Perth, Western Australia. It was a life I found, in common, I suspect, with most boys of that age, a trifle dull to say the least, but since leaving school my parents had spent most of their time discussing what they should do with me, and in the meanwhile left me to grow restless and discontented behind the counter. In those days, of course, Perth was a very different place from the present imposing city, and I could scarcely complain of the noise and racket of life in a metropolis! But there was a general air of restlessness in the settlement at the time. Every week faces we knew well would disappear and the news would come in that they had gone into the bush prospecting, that they were off to Coolgardie - the rush to the fields was still on then - or that they had gone out to some sheep-station to join a relative. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.