o save some particular piece of
property--several people heard me say so--and you alone would be able to
conjecture what this was. Imagine the gaping wonderment of the coroner's
jury! The Daily Telegraph would have made a leader out of me. "This poor
man was so strangely deluded as to the value of a novel in manuscript,
which it appears he had just completed, that he positively sacrificed
his life in the endeavour to rescue it from the flames." And
the Saturday would have had a column of sneering jocosity on the
irrepressibly sanguine temperament of authors. At all events, I should
have had my day of fame.'

'But what an ignoble death it would have been!' he pursued. 'Perishing
in the garret of a lodging-house which caught fire by the overturning of
a drunkard's lamp! One would like to end otherwise.'

'Where would you wish to die?' asked Reardon, musingly.

'At home,' replied the other, with pathetic emphasis. 'I have never had
a home since I was a boy, and am never likely to have one. But to die at
home is an unreasoning hope I still cherish.'

'If you had never come to London, what would you have now been?'

'Almost certainly a schoolmaster in some small town. And one might be
worse off than that, you know.'

'Yes, one might live peaceably enough in such a position. And I--I
should be in an estate-agent's office, earning a sufficient salary, and
most likely married to some unambitious country girl.

I should have lived an intelligible life, instead of only trying to
live, aiming at modes of life beyond my reach. My mistake was that of
numberless men nowadays. Because I was conscious of brains, I thought
that the only place for me was London. It's easy enough to understand
this common delusion. We form our ideas of London from old literature;
we think of London as if it were still the one centre of intellectual
life; we think and talk like Chatterton. But the truth is that
intellectual men in our day do their best to keep away from London--when
once they know the place. There are libraries everywhere; papers and
magazines reach the north of Scotland as soon as they reach Brompton;
it's only on rare occasions, for special kinds of work, that one is
bound to live in London. And as for recreation, why, now that no English
theatre exists, what is there in London that you can't enjoy in almost
any part of England? At all events, a yearly visit of a week would be
quite sufficient for all the special features of the t