After I had spent a few hours with comparative grammars and text-editions, or had been occupied with purely ethnographical studies, I always felt a desire to write a newspaper article, and to refresh myself from the monotony of word-sifting in the field of political speculation. The best time of the day, that is to say, the morning hours, I spent exclusively in serious study, and at the age between thirty and fifty I could also devote a few hours in the evening to graver study. In the forenoon, between ten and twelve, and in the afternoon, between two and five, I used to apply myself to politics and journalism, with the help of a secretary. Through practice and custom I had now got so far that I could dictate two or even three leading articles or other matters in different languages at the same time. When I approached the fifties, however, such _tours de force_ gave me headaches and congestion, and I had to abandon them; but long after I had passed the fifties I continued to dictate extempore--in fact, I generally wrote and worked from memory even in my scientific studies. Except the notes I wrote down during my Dervish tour in Arabic letters and in the Hungarian language, I have never had a notebook, and consequently never collected notes for future writings. Of course as was the material, so was the work produced, and it would be arrant self-deceit to try to conceal the blunders and defects under which so many of my literary productions laboured because of my mode of working. No, vanity has not altogether blinded me. Uncommon and curious as my schooling had been, equally curious was my subsequent literary productivity, and if there be anything to make me reflect with satisfaction upon those twenty years of literary activity, it is my untiring zeal and the strict adherence to my device "_Nulla dies sine linea_," in which I spent the beautiful summer of my life. Nothing of any kind or description either in my private or public life has ever made me break this rule, and no pleasures of any kind could ever replace for me the sweet hours of study or deter me from my once formed resolution.