you
were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to say it; and you
know I know more about literature than you do."

"Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts," he said meditatively; "and you ought
to know."

"But there is more to be said," he continued, after a pause painful to
both. "I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as I. I
know I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire with what I
have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to have
faith in that, though. I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my
writing. What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love."

"A year ago I believed for two years. One of those years is yet to run.
And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is run
I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago, that I
must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I have served it. I have
crammed it and telescoped it. With you at the end awaiting me, I have
never shirked. Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall
peacefully asleep. A few million years ago I knew what it was to sleep
my fill and to awake naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened
always now by an alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the
alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last
conscious actions."

"When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for a
lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my knuckles
in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who was afraid
to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man arranged a spur so that
when unconsciousness came, his naked body pressed against the iron teeth.
Well, I've done the same. I look at the time, and I resolve that not
until midnight, or not until one o'clock, or two o'clock, or three
o'clock, shall the spur be removed. And so it rowels me awake until the
appointed time. That spur has been my bed-mate for months. I have grown
so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance. I
sleep four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are times when I am
light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest and
sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by Longfellow's
lines:

"'The sea is still and deep;
All things within its bosom sleep;
A single step and all is o'er,
A plunge, a bubble, and no mor