lity.

My only reason for writing this is that the Barnetts go to bed early.
Doubtless I may also acquire the habit, in good time. Moreover, there is
always a danger of disturbing some important sermon-writing. In common
decency I can't bother these delightful people every evening, although
they have begged me to consider their home as my own. Mrs. Barnett is a
most charming woman, and never in my life have I known anything like the
welcome she impulsively extended, but she works hard and I cannot intrude
too much. Hence the hours after nine are exceedingly long, when it
chances that there are no sick people to look after. At first, of course,
I just mooned around, and called myself all sorts of names, honestly
considering myself the most stupendous fool ever permitted to exist in
freedom from restraint. I plunged into books and devoured the medical
weeklies which the irregular mails of the place brought me, yet this did
not entirely suffice, and now I have begun to write. It may help the time
to pass away, and prevent the attacks of mold and rust. Later on, if
things do not shape themselves according to my hopes, these dangers will
be of little import. These sheets may then mildew with the dampness of
this land, or fly away to sea with the shrewd breezes that sweep over our
coast, for all I shall care. At any rate they will have served their
purpose.

Of course I am trying to swallow my medicine like a little man. If there
is a being I despise it is the fellow who whimpers. There is little that
is admirable in professional pugilism, saving the smile often seen on a
fighter's face after he has just received a particularly hard and
crushing blow. Indeed, that smile is the bruiser's apology for his life.

Lest it be inferred that I have been fighting, I hasten to declare that
it was a rather one-sided contest in which I was defeated, lock, stock
and barrel, by a mere slip of a girl towards whom I had only lifted up my
hands in supplication.

"We are both very young, John," she explained to me, with an
exasperating, if unconscious, imitation of the doctors she had observed
as they announced very disagreeable things to their patients. "Our lives
are practically only beginning. Until now we have been like the
vegetables that are brought up in little wooden boxes. We are to be taken
up and planted in a field, where we are to grow up into something
useful."

"And we shall enjoy a great advantage over the young cabbages an