no one ever disturbs the
current of my circling thoughts. Never was a life more free from
interruptions from without. And if disturbance ever emanates from
within, why, clearly the fault must be my own, and should serve as a
reminder of how vastly uneasy my life would surely be in more
civilised surroundings, where interruptions descend upon one from
without, thick as smuts through the window of a London garret--save
where the garreteer cares to do without air. Here I sit with a noble
fire leaping at one end of my unlined, wooden room, and wide open
doors and windows all about me. As regards climate, in New South Wales
a man may come as near as may be to eating his cake and having it too.

And, for that long-sought mental restfulness, content, peace, whatever
one may call it, is not my present task a long step towards its
attainment? A completed record of the fitful struggle one calls one's
life, calmly studied in the light of reason untrammelled by sentiment,
never interrupted by the call of affairs; surely that should bring the
full measure of self-comprehension upon which peace is based! To doubt
that contentment lies that way would be wretchedness indeed. But why
should I doubt what the world's greatest sages have shown? True, my
own experience of life has suggested that contentment is rather the
monopoly of the simplest souls, whose understanding is very limited
indeed. A stinging thought this, and apt to keep a man wakeful at
night, if indulged. But I think it should not be indulged. To doubt
the existence of a higher order of content than that of the blissfully
ignorant is to brush aside as worthless and meaningless the best that
classic literature has to offer us, and--such doubts are pernicious
things.

Living here in this clean, sweet air, so far removed from the external
influences which make for fret and stress, my bodily health, at all
events, has small excuse for failure one would suppose. And, indeed,
at first it did seem to me that I was acquiring a more normal kind of
hardihood and working efficiency in this respect. But I regret to say
the supposition was not long-lived. Four or five months after my
arrival here I took to my bed for a fortnight, as the result of one of
the severest attacks I have ever had; and in the fifteen months which
have elapsed since then, my general health has been very much what it
was during the years before I left London, while the acute bouts of
neuritis and gastric troub