the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned
by high poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody
defiance of life's most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed,
an absurd pathetic figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the
wayward upland breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat
by my lamp late into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and
cynics, for no principles are dearer to a man than those which allow him
to profess contempt for the benefits which he cannot enjoy.

Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not
really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher.
And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my
sexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost
entirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all
was that though I was yet youthful, and should have been still pliant as
a sapling, I was fostering the growth of those habits which, like rings
in the grain, are the signature of unyielding years. Naturalists say
that a bullfinch fed only on hempseed gradually loses his fair plumage
and becomes black as a raven: so my soul, nourished on thoughts of
rebellion, put off its bright and diverse enthusiasms and was clothed in
the dark garment of despair.

When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn my
back upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss
of misery. The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was
abhorrent; and if I had been of the Roman Church I should have become a
Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of
finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute
detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind
to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then
thought might be a permanent sojourn in the East.

Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed,
and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range of
hills whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to a
tropical sea. My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a great
columned verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of an
upper valley threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far down
over rolling plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon.
Immediately to the e