bout my
final departure from England, after five-and-twenty years of working
life in London. I am not likely to forget any incident of it; but yet
the whole experience, both at the time and now, seemed (and seems) to
be shrouded in a kind of mist, a by no means disagreeable haze of
unreality, which in a measure numbed all my senses. More than ever
before I seemed to be, not so much living through an experience, as
observing it from a detached standpoint.

Investigation of my resources showed that I had accumulated some means
during the past dozen years of simple living and incessant work, not
ill-paid. I had just upon two thousand pounds invested, and between
one and two hundred pounds lying to my credit at call, I told myself
that living alone and simply in the bush, a hundred pounds in the year
would easily cover all my expenses. That I had anything like twenty
years of life before me was a supposition which I could not entertain
for one moment. And, therefore, I told myself again and again, with
curious insistence, there really was no reason why I need ever again
work for money, or waste one moment over petty anxiety regarding ways
and means. That was a very great boon, I told myself; the greatest of
all boons, and better fortune than in recent years I had dared to hope
would be mine. And, puzzled by the coldness with which my inner mind
responded to these assurances, I would reiterate them, watching my
mind the while, and almost angered by the absence of elation and
enthusiasm which I observed there.

'You have not properly realised as yet what it means, my friend,' I
murmured to myself as I walked slowly through city alley-ways, after
booking my passage to Sydney in a steam ship of perhaps seven times
the tonnage of the old _Ariadne_ of my boyhood's journey to Australia.
'But it is the biggest thing you have ever known. You will begin to
realise it presently. You are free. Do you hear? An absolutely free
man. You need never write another line unless you wish it, and then
you may write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are
going right away from this howling cockpit, and never need set foot in
it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the
open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure
leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what
you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free--free! Do you hear,
you tired hack? Too tired to prick your