itating, wondering if I should be able to buy up the old mills
and revive the trade in Tinnick, my sister Eliza reminded me that there
had always been a priest in the family. The priesthood seemed to offer
opportunities of realizing myself, of preserving the spirit within me.
It offered no such opportunities to me. I might as well have become a
policeman, and all that I have learned since is that everyone must try
to cling to his own soul; that is the only binding law. If we are here
for anything, it is surely for that.

'But one does not free one's self from habits and ideas, that have grown
almost inveterate, without much pain and struggle; one falls back many
times, and there are always good reasons for following the rut. We
believe that the rutted way leads us somewhere: it leads us nowhere, the
rutted way is only a seeming; for each man received his truth in the
womb. You say in your letter that our destinies got entangled, and that
the piece that was being woven ran out into thread, and was rewound upon
another spool. It seemed to you and it seemed to me that there is no
pattern; we think there is none because Nature's pattern is
undistinguishable to our eyes, her looms are so vast, but sometimes even
our little sight can follow a design here and there. And does it not
seem to you that, after all, there was some design in what has happened?
You came and released me from conventions, just as the spring releases
the world from winter rust.

'A strange idea has come into my mind, and I cannot help smiling at the
topsyturvydom of Nature, or what seems to be topsyturvydom. You, who
began by living in your instincts, are now wandering beyond Palestine in
search of scrolls; and I, who began my life in scrolls, am now going to
try to pick up the lost thread of my instincts in some great commercial
town, in London or New York. My life for a long time will be that of
some poor clerk or some hack journalist, picking up thirty shillings a
week when he is in luck. I imagine myself in a threadbare suit of
clothes edging my way along the pavement, nearing a great building, and
making my way to my desk, and, when the day's work is done, returning
home along the same pavement to a room high up among the rafters, close
to the sky, in some cheap quarter.

'I do not doubt my ability to pick up a living--it will be a shameful
thing indeed if I cannot; for the poor curlew with its legs tied
together managed to live somehow, and canno