ad not placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine,
and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name,
cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head--in
Linda Viola's voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and love--all that had come down
crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in
that very moment I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"

The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck training even
in a merchant ship will do! This episode should give you a new view of
the English and Scots seamen (a much-caricatured folk) who had the last
say in the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest,
but in this disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple
teaching. "Won't you sit down?" Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat
down. Her amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of
MS. on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a chair,
single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners; there were there
living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead pages that would be burnt
at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel battlefield, of a long,
long and desperate fray. Long! I suppose I went to bed sometimes, and
got up the same number of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the
food put before me, and talked connectedly to my household on suitable
occasions. But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily
life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at that table
surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days and nights on
end. It seemed so, because of the intense weariness of which that
interruption had made me aware--the awful disenchantment of a mind
realising suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined to a bodily
fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical labour could
ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost
double under a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in
the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know.

And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned for the
dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most likely, the only
writer that neat lady had ever cau