so saved me from ennui. I found myself living a
much busier life than I had ever lived. I had never worked so hard,
and yet there was not a single part of my work that did not add to my
delight. And I worked for direct results, for things I could see, and
things which I might justly claim as my own, since I had created them.

I shall perhaps fall under the suspicion of morbid sensitiveness when I
confess that I never took my weekly wage in London without a qualm and
a compunction, for I could never make myself believe that I had really
earned it. What had I done? I had simply performed a few arithmetical
processes which any schoolboy might have done as well. My labour, such
as it was, was absorbed instantly in the commercial operations of a
great firm. I could not trace it, and I had no means of estimating its
value. The money I took for it seemed therefore to come to me by a
sort of legerdemain. That some one thought it worth while to pay me
was ostensible proof that my work was really worth something; but so
little able was I to penetrate the processes that resulted in this
judgment, so vivid was the sense of some ingenious jugglery in the
whole business, that I did not know whether I had been cheated or was a
cheat, in living by a kind of labour that cost me so little. How
different was my feeling now! At the end of an hour's spade-work, I
saw something actually done, of which I was the indisputable author.
When I laid down the saw and plane and hammer, and stretched my aching
back, I saw something growing into shape, which I myself had created.
There was no jugglery about this; there was immediate intimate relation
between cause and effect. And thence I found a kind of joy in my work,
which was new and exquisite to me. I stood upon my own feet,
self-possessed, self-respecting, efficient for my own needs, and
conscious of a definite part in the great rhythm of infinite toil which
makes the universe. It is only when a man works for himself that this
kind of joy is felt. So enamoured was I of this new joy, that had it
been possible I would have possessed nothing that was not the direct
result of my own labour. I would have liked to have spun the wool for
my own clothes, and have tanned the leather for my own boots. I would
have liked to grow the corn for my own bread, and have killed my own
meat, as the savage or the primitive settler does. In this respect the
savage or the primitive settler approaches