Finding sleep out of the question, I got up and attempted to write an article which I had promised to bring down to the _Tocsin_ the following morning. The subject I had chosen was "The Right to Happiness," and I argued that man has a right not only to daily bread, as the Socialists maintain, but also to happiness, consisting in the fullest development and exercise of all his faculties, a condition only possible when the individual shall be perfectly free, living in a harmonious society of free men, untrammelled by artificial economic difficulties, and by superstitions inherited from the past. Some days previously we had had a discussion on the subject at the office of the _Tocsin_, and I had maintained my views victoriously against the pessimistic dogmatism of a German comrade. But now my arguments seemed hollow to myself, mere rhetoric, and even that of third-rate quality. Happiness! Did not the mere fact of attaining our desires deprive them of their charm? Life was an alternating of longing and regret. I pushed paper and pen aside, and began roaming aimlessly about the house. The large old-fashioned rooms impressed me as strangely silent and forlorn. I wandered up to the attic which our father had used as a laboratory, and which had always struck us children as a mysterious apartment, where he did wonderful things with strange-shaped instruments and bottles which we were told contained deadly poison. His apparatus was still ranged on the shelves, thick in dust, and the air was heavy with the pungent smell of acids. The large drawing-rooms with their heavy hangings looked shabbier and dingier than of old; I could not help noticing the neglected look of everything. I had hardly entered them during the past year, and now I vaguely wondered whether Caroline on her return would wish to have them renovated. Then I remembered how I had received there for the first time, some four years ago, my brother's Socialist friend, and I could not help smiling as I recollected my excitement on that occasion. I was indeed young in those days! I picked up a book which was lying on a table thick in dust, and sat down listlessly in the roomy arm-chair by the fireside, which had been my father's favourite seat. I began turning the pages of a volume, "The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," and gradually I became absorbed in its contents. Here was a man who had known how to create for himself in his own soul an oasis of rest, not by practising a selfish indifference to, and isolation from, public matters--not by placing his hopes in some future paradise, the compensation of terrestrial suffering, but by rising superior to external events, and, whilst fulfilling his duty as emperor and man, not allowing himself to be flustered or perturbed by the inevitable. "Abolish opinion, you have abolished this complaint, 'Some one has harmed me.' Suppress the complaint, 'Some one has harmed me,' and the harm itself is suppressed." What wisdom in these words!