discharge from hospital.

'Nuisance about the money,' admitted the doctor genially, as he
twiddled his massive gold watch-chain. 'But it might have been a deal
worse, you know; a very great deal worse. After all, health's the
thing, the only thing that really matters.'

The remark strikes me now as reasonable enough. At the time I thought
it pretty vapid twaddle. Four quiet days I spent at my North Shore
lodging, and then (by Mr. Foster's freely and most kindly given
permission) back to the _Chronicle_ office again, just as before, save
for one detail--I no longer had a banking account. But was it really,
'just as before,' in any single sense? No, I think not; I think not.

Often in the years that have passed since that morning chat with the
cheerful physician in Sydney Hospital, I have heard folk speak lightly
of money losses--other people's losses, as a rule--and talk of the
comparative unimportance of these as against various other kinds of
loss. Never, I think, at all events, since those Sydney days of mine,
could any one justly charge me with overestimating the importance of
money. And yet, even now, and despite the theories of the
philosophers, I incline to the opinion that few more desolating and
heart-breaking disasters can befall men and women than the loss of
their savings. I would not instance such a case as mine. But I have
known cases of both men and women who, in the later years, have lost
the thrifty savings of a working life, savings accumulated very
deliberately--and at what a cost of patient, long-sustained
self-denial!--for a specific purpose: the purchase of their freedom in
the closing years; their manumission from wage-earning toil. And I say
that, in a world constituted as our world is, life knows few tragedies
more starkly fell.

As for my little loss I now think it likely that in certain ways I
derived benefits from it; and, too, in other ways, permanent hurt. I
was still standing in the doorway of my manhood; all my life and
energy as a man before me. But it did not seem so at the time. At the
time I thought of this handful of money as being the sole outcome and
reward for six years of pretty strenuous working effort. (What a lot I
overlooked!) I was far from telling myself that a lad of one-and-twenty
had his career still to begin. On the contrary, it seemed my
career had had for its culminating point the great adventure of going
to England, to attain which long years of toilsome work had