But taking things all round I was happier than I had been for many a day. Having been set free from that awful burden of the shop, and being finished for ever, (I hoped) with the whole body of County Court officials, bum-bailiffs, etc., I experienced a restful peace to which I had long been a stranger. I recovered much of my lost vigour, for although the habit of work still clung to me and I did not waste a minute if I could help it, I no longer dreaded a knock at the door, no longer felt symptoms of heart failure at the sight of a postman coming towards me. Now and then I thought of my fortieth birthday fast approaching, believing as I did that a man of forty was too old to strike out any new line, that if he had never done anything worth doing he never would, and much more of the same tenor. But most happily, however these pessimistic thoughts harassed me they did not affect my conduct, not because I determined that they should not, or braced myself in an heroic resolve to defy fate, age, or anything else that should tend to hinder my advancement, but for the same reason that I kept going so long in that hopeless shop, because the necessity was laid upon me, as the nigger song says, to keep "a-pushin' an' a-shovin'." Very disagreeable to other people in many cases this persistence of a fellow for whom _they_ cannot see the slightest necessity, but then, so much depends upon the point of view. My only object in writing the penultimate sentence is to clear myself of any suspicion of false hypocritical pretence. I have the greatest horror and detestation of posing as one who, by sheer force of will and decision of character, has conquered circumstances, lived instead of died, and although wrecked apparently beyond salvage has reconstructed something navigable and sailed away from a far more profitable voyage. For I know that these things depend upon the quality of the fibre of which a man is wrought and for which he can take no credit. It is this which often keeps a man at work when, had he been living in more prosperous conditions, he would have been in bed with grave doctors and nurses around him, and hourly bulletins as to his temperature, etc., being issued. I remember during the first influenza epidemic the case of a carter for one of the great carrying companies in London who, it being a busy season, had been on duty twenty hours. He drove into the yard in the small hours of the morning, dropped the reins on his horse's back, but did not descend from his dickey. As he gave no reply to repeated hailing by his mates below, one mounted to him and found him stiff in death. It came out at the inquest that on leaving home twenty hours before he had told his wife that he felt very bad, one moment shivering and the next burning, and all his limbs one big ache, but the fibre of the man insisted upon going on. Fear of losing his job, of being short in his scanty week's earnings had spurred him, but