am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into
appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. No one realizes
the danger more than I do. But what a foolish thing to write here--for
there is no one to know, no one to realize! My mind of late has held
unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and
drugs and the treatment of strange illnesses. I cannot imagine their
source. At no time in my life have I dwelt upon such ideas as now
constantly throng my brain. I have had no exercise lately, for the
weather has been shocking; and all my afternoons have been spent in the
reading-room of the British Museum, where I have a reader's ticket.

I have made an unpleasant discovery: there are rats in the house. At
night from my bed I have heard them scampering across the hills and
valleys of the front room, and my sleep has been a good deal disturbed
in consequence.

* * * * *

Oct. 24.--Last night the son who is "somethink on a homnibus" came in.
He had evidently been drinking, for I heard loud and angry voices below
in the kitchen long after I had gone to bed. Once, too, I caught the
singular words rising up to me through the floor, "Burning from top to
bottom is the only thing that'll ever make this 'ouse right." I knocked
on the floor, and the voices ceased suddenly, though later I again heard
their clamour in my dreams.

These rooms are very quiet, almost too quiet sometimes. On windless
nights they are silent as the grave, and the house might be miles in the
country. The roar of London's traffic reaches me only in heavy, distant
vibrations. It holds an ominous note sometimes, like that of an
approaching army, or an immense tidal-wave very far away thundering in
the night.

* * * * *

Oct. 27.--Mrs. Monson, though admirably silent, is a foolish, fussy
woman. She does such stupid things. In dusting the room she puts all my
things in the wrong places. The ash-trays, which should be on the
writing-table she sets in a silly row on the mantelpiece. The pen-tray,
which should be beside the inkstand, she hides away cleverly among the
books on my reading-desk. My gloves she arranges daily in idiotic array
upon a half-filled bookshelf, and I always have to rearrange them on the
low table by the door. She places my armchair at impossible angles
between the fire and the light, and the tablecloth--the one with Trinity
Hall sta