Investigation of my resources showed that I had accumulated some means during the past dozen years of simple living and incessant work, not ill-paid. I had just upon two thousand pounds invested, and between one and two hundred pounds lying to my credit at call, I told myself that living alone and simply in the bush, a hundred pounds in the year would easily cover all my expenses. That I had anything like twenty years of life before me was a supposition which I could not entertain for one moment. And, therefore, I told myself again and again, with curious insistence, there really was no reason why I need ever again work for money, or waste one moment over petty anxiety regarding ways and means. That was a very great boon, I told myself; the greatest of all boons, and better fortune than in recent years I had dared to hope would be mine. And, puzzled by the coldness with which my inner mind responded to these assurances, I would reiterate them, watching my mind the while, and almost angered by the absence of elation and enthusiasm which I observed there. 'You have not properly realised as yet what it means, my friend,' I murmured to myself as I walked slowly through city alley-ways, after booking my passage to Sydney in a steam ship of perhaps seven times the tonnage of the old _Ariadne_ of my boyhood's journey to Australia. 'But it is the biggest thing you have ever known. You will begin to realise it presently. You are free. Do you hear? An absolutely free man. You need never write another line unless you wish it, and then you may write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are going right away from this howling cockpit, and never need set foot in it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free--free! Do you hear, you tired hack? Too tired to prick your ears, eh? Ah, well, wait till you've been a week or two at sea!' Very quietly I addressed my sluggish and jaded self in this wise. Yet more than one hurried walker in the city ways looked curiously at me, as I passed along, with a wondering scrutiny which amused me a good deal. 'Too tired to prick your ears.' The suggestion came from the contemptuously self-commiserating thought that I was rather like a worn-out 'bus horse, to whom some benevolent minor Providence was offering the freedom of a fine grazing paddock. 'You're too much galled and spavined, you poor devil, to be moved by verbal assurances. Wait till you scent the breezy upland, and your feet feel the turf. You'll know better what it all means then.'