he 19th of
June at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and I
pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such
a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good
God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the
devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When the
thirty-three ...

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeen
years since--long years--seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to
what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of
the _Speranza_, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's
aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.

I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few
lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man
not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen,
seventeen ... ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I
have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if
the spelling of some of them is queer. My brain has been thinking
inarticulately perhaps, all these years: and the English words and
letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and
foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who
has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the
impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of
tackling them. Or perhaps it is only my fancy: for that I have fancies I
know.

But what to write? The history of those seventeen years could not be put
down, my good God: at least, it would take me seventeen more to do it.
If I were to detail the building of the palace alone, and how it killed
me nearly, and how I twice fled from it, and had to return, and became
its bounden slave, and dreamed of it, and grovelled before it, and
prayed, and raved, and rolled; and how I forgot to make provision on the
west side for the contraction and expansion of the gold in the colder
weather and the heats of summer, and had to break down nine months'
work, and how I cursed Thee, how I cursed Thee; and how the lake of wine
evaporated faster than the conduits replenished it, and