I never was idle. I worked at one thing after another. The _Catholic Hour_ admits my skill; and mispresents that as a crime. At the same time, I myself don't claim my indefatigability as a virtue. Nothing of the kind. It's something lower than that. It's comical to say it: but my indefatigability was nothing but a purely selfish pose, put-on solely to make philanthropists look unspeakably silly, to give the lie direct to all their idiotic iniquitous shibboleths. It wasn't that I _couldn't_ stop working: but that I _wouldn't_. The fact is that I long, I burn, I yearn, I thirst, I most earnestly desire, to do absolutely nothing. I am so tired. I have such a genius for elaborate repose. But convention always alleges idleness, or drunkenness, or lechery, or luxury, to be the causa causans of scoundrelism and of poverty. That's a specimen of the 'Eidola Specus,' the systematizing spirit which damns half the world. People never stop to think that there may be other causes--that men of parts become rakes, or scoundrels, or paupers, for lack of opportunity to live decently and cleanly. Look at François Villon, and Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Richard Steele, and Leo di Giovanni, and heaps of others. Well: I resolutely determined that you never righteously should allege those things of me. Simply to deprive you of that excuse for your failure to do your duty to your neighbour--simply to deprive you of the chance of classifying me among the ruck which your neglect has made--I courted semi-starvation and starvation, I scrupulously avoided drink, I hardly ever even spoke civilly to a woman; and I laboured like a driven slave. No: I never was idle. But I was a most abject fool. I used to think that this diligent ascetic life eventually would pay me best. I made the mistake of omitting to give its due importance to the word 'own' in the adage 'Virtue is its own reward.' I had no other reward, except my unwillingly cultivated but altogether undeniable virtue. A diabolic brute once said to me 'If I had your brains I would be earning a thousand a year.' I replied 'Take them: tell me what to do: give me orders, and I implicitly will obey you. Then, take that thousand a year, and give me two hundred; and I'll bless you all my days.' He said nothing; and he did nothing. He was just a fatuous liar. I mocked him: caught him stealing my correspondence--there is his written confession;--and, he wrote these anonymous calumnies in long cherished revenge." The dreadful lambent voice flickered for a moment;--and more rapidly flashed-on. "I repeat, I never was idle. I did work after work. I designed furniture, and fire-irons. I delineated saints and seraphim, and sinners, chiefly the former: a series of rather interesting and polyonomous devils in a period of desperate revolt. I slaved as a professional photographer, making (from French prints) a set of negatives for lantern-slides of the Holy Land which