Six times in the course of my life, when I have been starved sick on my own feeding, I have become a “table-boarder”; and out of those six experiences I could make myself another Zola. The infinite variety of animality in those six vile stables--the champing jaws and the slobbering mouths and the rank odor of food! The men who shoveled with their knives or plastered things on their forks as hod-carriers do mortar! The women who sucked in their soup, and the children who smeared their faces and licked their lips and slopped upon the table-cloth! The fat Dutchman who grunted when he ate, and then leaned back and panted! The yellow woman with the false teeth who gathered everything about her on the table! The flashy gentleman with the diamond scarf-pin and the dirty cuffs, who made a tower out of his dirty dishes and then sucked his teeth! O God! And the loathsome food!--For seven years I have had my nose stamped into this mud, and all in vain; I can still starve, but I can not eat what is not clean. --Some day I shall put into a book all the rage and all the hate and all the infamy of these things, and it will be a book that will make your flesh sizzle. And you will wonder why I did it! It will be better than Troilus and Cressida, better than the end of Gulliver's Travels--better than Swellfoot the Tyrant! * * * * * I wonder why nobody else ever reads or mentions Swellfoot the Tyrant? I call it the most whole-hearted, thorough-going, soul-satisfying piece of writing in any language that I know. * * * * * --When you think of my work you must think of these things! I do not mention them often, but they are never out of my mind. If you should read anything beautiful of mine, you must bear in mind that it is about half a chance that there was a dirty child screaming out in the hall while I wrote it. * * * * * September 20th. It took me a couple of days to realize that I have still not to go down-town. But I have a fine facility in making myself new habits! Just now I am on a four months' studying campaign. It is monotonous--to read about. I get up at six, and when I have had my breakfast and fixed a lunch, I go over into the Park. There are only birds and squirrels and a few tramps about then, and it is glorious. Sometimes I am so happy that I do not want to read; later come the squalling children and the hot sun; but I flit about from place to place. I wonder what they think of me!-- Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir! * * * * * I read all day, right straight along, and all night, now that it is not too hot. I have always done my reading by periods--I read our nineteenth-century poets that way, sixteen hours a day; I read Shakespeare in three weeks that way, and finished the month with Milton. So when I got German, I read Goethe and Schiller, and Molière and Hugo again.