Don’t pity me. Call me a mad dog, say that I am a peculiar idiot, say that I have been a fool and wasted my life; but don’t pity me! And if there is one thing more abhorrent to me than self-praise, it is self-pity. I am disgusted with myself, who might have amounted to some one. Then I would not have been lonely, physically lonely. And there is mental loneliness, more galling, more gnawing, than murky solitude. The following blames no one except myself: “I felt myself pressed onward by an internal force, which I could not resist.--Let us look into this a little, and see whether the direction you gave to your life has not had for its object to make this force irresistible.” That may be. But I prefer to know what I actually am, than to be proud and contented in a _cul-de-sac_. Tumble-bugs roll from rut to rut, clinging to their eggs, never knowing that they are tumble-bugs. I would rather be unhappy than be the man with illusions, snug in his own pettiness. If contentment comes only from rolling in a rut, then I choose discontent. “Come, review your days and your years, call them to account! Tell us how much time you have allowed to be stolen from you by a creditor, by a mistress, by a patron, by a client.” Which of us can read those lines without blushing? This night is my birth night. Nine and twenty years ago, at eleven o’clock, when the July sun had sunk out of the valley of the James, when the cattle were at rest, and the whippoorwills uttered forth their conscience-stricken notes, “Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” the moon had arisen and shone upon the purple bloom of the fox-grapes, hidden above the brook, then a deep joy came over my mother and she was delivered of me. It must have been the blessed, unspeakable, sacred joy of labour, which men never know. My father told me once that she wept in the midst of her joy--that is how I know. XIII Suffering, suffering. Oh, mystery of pain! Then surcease from pain. And pain again. Oh, mystery of death, the _sure_ relief. And yet I can not bring myself to do that. “You must have sleep at any cost,” my doctor says, “or the mind will give.”