Ignorance of journalistic conditions and requirements, combined with a foolish sort of personal sensitiveness or vanity, had more to do with my early hardships and difficulties than anything in the quality of my work. In the light of practical knowledge acquired later I see that I might with ease have earned at least five times the amount of money I did earn in those first years by doing about half the amount of work I did, and--knowing how to dispose of it. I concentrated my entire stock of youthful energy upon writing and reading, and really worked very hard indeed. That, I thought, was my business. Some vague, benevolent power, 'the World,' I suppose, was to see to it that I got my reward. My part was to do the work. Good work might be trusted to bring its own reward. And, in any case, I asked no more than that I should be able to live with decency and go on with my work. I no longer had the faintest sort of interest in the idea of saving money. That ambition died with the end of my saving days in Sydney. I never thought about it at all. It simply had ceased to exist. Well, my work, as a matter of fact, was not at all bad, and it was amazingly abundant. I would wager I wrote not less than three hundred articles, sketches, and stories during my first year, probably more, and always in the most hostile and unsuitable sort of environments. And my reward in that first year was slightly less than twenty pounds sterling, something well below an average of two guineas each month. I suppose I might have starved in that first year if I had not had some twenty pounds in hand at the beginning of it. I had not twenty shillings in hand at the end of it, and yet I had already learned what hunger meant; not the bracing sensation of being sharp set and enjoying one's meal, but the dull, deadening, sickly sensation which comes of sustained work during weeks of bread and butter (or dripping) diet, and none too much of that. The devilish thing about an insufficient dietary is that it saps one's manhood. Few people whose circumstances have been uniformly comfortable realise that the stomach is the real seat of self-respect, courage, dignity, good manners, and the higher sort of honour, not to mention the spirits and emotions. Most would scoff at the suggestion, of course, feeling that it showed the low nature of the suggester. And the thing of it is they cannot possibly test the truth of it. For, given an average share of self-control and will-power, any educated person can starve him or herself for a week or more, deliberately and of set purpose, without much inconvenience, with no difficulty, and no loss of self-respect.