Henceforth his days and nights were a long struggle against suffering, with a determination, however, to go on with his work. Nothing more wonderful than the courage and resolution of this man. As in youth he had resolved to succeed somehow, though as yet ignorant of the better way, so now he _would_ not be beaten by pain. His very best work, the work which will cause him to live, the work which places him among the writers of his country, to be remembered and to be read long after the men of his generation are dead and forgotten, was actually done while he was in this suffering. The "Pageant of Summer," for example: well, the "Pageant of Summer" reads as if it were the work of a man revelling in the warmth of the quivering air; of a man in perfect health and strength, body and mind at ease, surrendered wholly to the influence of the flowers and the sunshine, at peace, save for the natural sadness of one who communes much with himself on change, decay, and death. And yet the "Pageant of Summer" was written while he was in deadly pain and torture. Again, between 1883 and 1886 he published those collections of papers called "Life in the Fields" and "The Open Air." He also wrote "Red Deer," "Amaryllis," and a quantity of papers which have yet to be collected and published. If, even for a moment, he had an interval of strength, his busy pen began again to race over the paper, hasting to set down the thoughts that filled his brain. His disease was discovered, after a period of intense suffering, to be an ulceration of the small intestine. It was weakness induced by this disease, which caused other complications, under which he gradually sank. I suppose that Jefferies could never be considered a strong man. As a boy, tall, active, nervous, he was muscularly weaker than his younger brother. At the age of eighteen he showed symptoms which caused fear of a decline. Perhaps his intense love of the open air indicated the kind of medicine which he most needed. When he could no longer go into the open air he died. Perhaps, too, the consciousness of physical weakness, the sense of impending early death, caused him to yearn with so much longing after physical perfection and the fuller life which he clearly saw was possible. Those who are doomed to die young--as has been often observed--have the deepest sense and the keenest enjoyment of life. Still, though not a strong man, he was apparently a healthy man. He lived at all times a simple and a healthy life; there was nothing to show that he was going to be struck down by so cruel an illness. The period of greatest suffering seems to have been in the year 1884. The weakness following it set in some time during the year 1885. He writes to Mr. Charles Longman in May of the latter year: