For, whilst the comparative zestfulness of the first months, when I worked with Isaiah Fetch to improve my rough-hewn little hermitage, may not have endured, yet are there many obvious and substantial advantages for me in the life I lead here, in this little bush back-water, where the few human creatures who know of my existence regard me as a poor, harmless kind of crank, and no one ever disturbs the current of my circling thoughts. Never was a life more free from interruptions from without. And if disturbance ever emanates from within, why, clearly the fault must be my own, and should serve as a reminder of how vastly uneasy my life would surely be in more civilised surroundings, where interruptions descend upon one from without, thick as smuts through the window of a London garret--save where the garreteer cares to do without air. Here I sit with a noble fire leaping at one end of my unlined, wooden room, and wide open doors and windows all about me. As regards climate, in New South Wales a man may come as near as may be to eating his cake and having it too. And, for that long-sought mental restfulness, content, peace, whatever one may call it, is not my present task a long step towards its attainment? A completed record of the fitful struggle one calls one's life, calmly studied in the light of reason untrammelled by sentiment, never interrupted by the call of affairs; surely that should bring the full measure of self-comprehension upon which peace is based! To doubt that contentment lies that way would be wretchedness indeed. But why should I doubt what the world's greatest sages have shown? True, my own experience of life has suggested that contentment is rather the monopoly of the simplest souls, whose understanding is very limited indeed. A stinging thought this, and apt to keep a man wakeful at night, if indulged. But I think it should not be indulged. To doubt the existence of a higher order of content than that of the blissfully ignorant is to brush aside as worthless and meaningless the best that classic literature has to offer us, and--such doubts are pernicious things. Living here in this clean, sweet air, so far removed from the external influences which make for fret and stress, my bodily health, at all events, has small excuse for failure one would suppose. And, indeed, at first it did seem to me that I was acquiring a more normal kind of hardihood and working efficiency in this respect. But I regret to say the supposition was not long-lived. Four or five months after my arrival here I took to my bed for a fortnight, as the result of one of the severest attacks I have ever had; and in the fifteen months which have elapsed since then, my general health has been very much what it was during the years before I left London, while the acute bouts of neuritis and gastric trouble, when they have come, have been worse, I think, than those of earlier years.