circulation,
call me "'Arry" (without an "H," the satirical rogue), and is not his
contempt for the English-speaking people based chiefly upon the fact that
some of them read my books? But in the days of Bloomsbury lodgings and
first-night pits we thought each other clever.

From "Jephson" I hold a letter, dated from a station deep in the heart of
the Queensland bush. "_Do what you like with it, dear boy_," the letter
runs, "_so long as you keep me out of it. Thanks for your complimentary
regrets, but I cannot share them. I was never fitted for a literary
career. Lucky for me, I found it out in time. Some poor devils don't.
(I'm not getting at you, old man. We read all your stuff, and like it
very much. Time hangs a bit heavy, you know, here, in the winter, and we
are glad of almost anything.) This life suits me better. I love to feel
my horse between my thighs, and the sun upon my skin. And there are the
youngsters growing up about us, and the hands to look after, and the
stock. I daresay it seems a very commonplace unintellectual life to you,
but it satisfies my nature more than the writing of books could ever do.
Besides, there are too many authors as it is. The world is so busy
reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking. You'll tell me,
of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon of the
Press. You come out here, old man, and sit as I do sometimes for days
and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an upheaved island of
earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky, and you will know that
they are not. What a man thinks--really thinks--goes down into him and
grows in silence. What a man writes in books are the thoughts that he
wishes to be thought to think_."

Poor Jephson! he promised so well at one time. But he always had strange
notions.

CHAPTER I

When, on returning home one evening, after a pipe party at my friend
Jephson's, I informed my wife that I was going to write a novel, she
expressed herself as pleased with the idea. She said she had often
wondered I had never thought of doing so before. "Look," she added, "how
silly all the novels are nowadays; I'm sure you could write one."
(Ethelbertha intended to be complimentary, I am convinced; but there is a
looseness about her mode of expression which, at times, renders her
meaning obscure.)

When, however, I told her that my friend Jephson was going to collaborate
with me, she remarked,