"Well, that's just to show you. Man alive, I've stood sometimes in my office with my head in such a whirling crash, and feeling so sick and frightened--that always went with it--that I've felt I must catch by the throat the next man who came in and kill him dead before he could speak to me. In my head, man, in my head--felt things all my life in my head: and in my heart;" and Mr. Wriford would strike himself fiercely upon his breast. "Felt things in my heart so I was always in a torment and always tying myself up tighter and tighter and tighter--not doing this because I thought it was unkind to this person; and doing that because I thought I ought to do it for that person--messing, messing, messing round and spoiling my life with rotten sentiment and rotten ideas of rotten duty. God, when I think of the welter of it all! Now, my boy, it's all over! My head's as empty as an empty bucket and so's my heart. I don't care a curse for anybody or anything. I'm beginning to do what I ought to have done years ago--enjoy myself. It's only my body now; I want to ache it and feel it and hurt it and keep it going all the time. If I don't, if I stop going and going and going, I begin to think; and if I begin to think I begin to go back again. Then up I jump, my boy, and let fly at somebody again, or dig or whatever the work is, as if the devil was in me and until my body is ready to break, and then I say to my body: 'Go on, you devil; go on. I'll keep you at it till you drop. You've been getting soft and rotten while my head was working and driving me. Now it's your turn. But you don't drive me, my boy; I drive you. Get at it!' That's the way of it, Puddlebox. I'm free now, and I'm enjoying myself, and I want to go on doing new things and doing them hard, always and all the time. Now then!" Mr. Puddlebox: "Sure you're enjoying yourself, boy?" "Why, of course I am. When it was all this cursed head and all worry I didn't belong to myself. Now it's all body, and I'm my own. I've missed something all my life. Now I'm finding it. I'm finding what it is to be happy--it's not to care. That's the secret of it." Mr. Puddlebox would shake his head. "That's not the secret of it, boy." "What is, then?" "Why, what I've told you: not to think so much about yourself." "Well, that's just what I'm doing. I'm not caring a curse what happens to me." "Yes, and thinking about that all the time. That's just where you're spooked, boy." "Spooked!" Mr. Wriford would cry with an easy laugh. "That's seeing myself like I used to. I've not seen myself for weeks--months." "But you're not unspooked yet, boy," Mr. Puddlebox would return. II