Is this a peculiar disease, or am I merely noting a characteristic of my own which is also a characteristic of the age in which I have lived? I wonder! It is, at all events, a way of living which involves a rather tragical waste of the good red stuff of life; and, yes, upon the whole it is a form of restless waste and extravagance which I fancy is far from rare among the thinking men and women of my time. They do not travel; they hurry from one place to another. They do not enjoy; they pursue enjoyment. They do not rest; they arrange very elaborately, cleverly, strenuously to catch rest--and miss it. Is it not possible that some of us do not live, but use up all the time at our disposal in sweating, toiling, scheming preparation for the particular sort of life we think would suit us; the kind of life we are aiming at; the end, in fact, in pursuit of which we expend and exhaust our whole share of life as a means? Though these things strike me now, it is needless to say they formed no part of my mental outlook in Dursley. As is often the case in Australian homes, the colony of out-buildings upon Mr. Perkins's premises at Dursley was more extensive than the parent building. Between the main house and the stable, with all its attendant minor sheds and lean-to, was a long, low-roofed wooden structure, divided into dairy, wash-house, tool-room, workshop, and, at the end farthest from the dairy, what is called a 'man's room.' This latter apartment was now my private sanctuary, entered by nobody else, unless at my invitation. I grew quite fond of this little room, which measured eight feet by twelve feet, and had a window looking down the ridge and across the creek to Dursley in its valley and the wooded hills beyond. I had no lamp in my sanctuary, and no fireplace. But the climate of New South Wales is kindly, and, when one is used to it and one's eyes are young, the light of a single candle is surprisingly satisfying. That, at all events, was the light by which I mastered the intricacies of Pitman's system of shorthand, besides reading most of the volumes in Dursley's School of Arts library. The reading I accomplished in bed; the shorthand studies on the top of a packing-case which hailed originally from a match factory in east London, and doubtless had contained the curious little cylindrical cardboard boxes of wax vestas, stamped with a sort of tartan plaid pattern, that are seen so far as I know only in Australia, though made in England. At first, like others who have trodden the same thorny path, I went ahead swimmingly with my shorthand, confining myself to the writing of it on the packing-case. Being at the end of the current bed-book (it was Charles Reade's _Griffith Gaunt_) I took my latest masterpiece of shorthand to bed with me one night, only to find that I could barely read one word in ten. That was a rather perturbed and unhappy night, and my progress thereafter was a somewhat slower and more laborious process.