I get up--I never know the time in the morning; and sometimes I lie without moving for hours--thinking--thinking. Or sometimes I go out and roam around the streets; or sit perfectly motionless, gazing at the wall. When it will not come, I make it. I breakfast on bread and milk, and I eat bread and milk at all hours of the day when I am hungry. For dinner I cook a piece of meat on a little oil-stove, and for supper I eat bread and milk. The rest of the time I am sitting on the floor by the window, writing; or perhaps kneeling by the bed with my head buried in my arms, and thinking until the room reels. When I am not doing that I wander around like a lost soul; I can not think of anything else.--Sometimes when I am tired and must rest, I force myself to sit down and write some of this. I have just forty dollars now. It costs me three dollars a week, not including paper and typewriting. Thus I have ten or twelve weeks in which to finish The Captive--that many and no more. If I am not finished by that time it will kill me; to try to work and earn money in the state that I am in just at present would turn me into a maniac--I should kill some one, I know. I am quivering with nervous tension--every faculty strained to breaking; the buzz of a fly is a roar to me. I build up these towering castles of emotion in my soul, castles that shimmer in the sunlight: Banners yellow, glorious, golden! And then something happens, and they fall upon me with the weight of mountains. * * * * * Ten weeks! And yet it is not that which goads me most. What goads me most is that I am a captive in a dungeon, and am fighting for the life of my soul. I shall win, I do not fear--the fountains of my being will not fail me. I saw my soul a second time to-day; it was no longer the bubble, blown large, palpitating. It was a bird resting upon a bough. The bough was tossed and flung about by a tempest; and a chasm yawned below; but the bough held, and the bird was master of its wings, and sang. The name of the bough was Faith. * * * * * April 27th. I have read a great deal of historical romance, and a great deal of local color fiction, and a great deal of original character-drawing--and I have wished to get away from these things. There is no local color, and no character-drawing, in The Captive. You do not know the name of the hero; you do not know how old he is, or of what rank he is, at what period or in what land he lives. He is described but once. He is “A Man.” My philosophy is a philosophy of will. All virtue that I know is conditioned upon freedom. The object of all thinking and doing, as I see it, is to set men free.