way from home
during the day. Jasmine and a crimson rambler strayed about the window
of my little study, from which the view of the surrounding hills was
delightful. For some days I explored the neighbourhood assiduously.
And then I began to write my fourth book. The third--a volume of short
stories of mean streets, written in the days preceding my marriage--was
then passing through the press.

When I first went to Dorking my health was in a very poor way. I
imagine I must at the time have been on the verge of a pretty bad
breakdown. The preceding six or eight months had greatly aggravated my
digestive troubles, and I had also suffered a good deal from
neuralgia. The constantly increasing stress of my domestic affairs,
superimposed upon steady sedentary work in which the quest for new
ideas was a continuous preoccupation, and combined with the effects of
an irregular and indifferent dietary and lack of air and exercise, had
reduced me physically to a low ebb.

During those last weeks in London, after Fanny's death, I was not
conscious of this collapse; and my first week in Dorking had a
curiously stimulating effect upon me. Indeed, I fancy that week was
the saving of me. But at the end of it, after one long day's writing,
I took to my bed with influenza, and remained there for some time,
dallying also with bronchitis, incipient pneumonia, gastritis, and a
diphtheritic throat.

Six weeks passed before I left my bedroom, but during only one of
those weeks did I fail to produce my weekly contribution to the
_Advocate_. If the quality of those contributions in any way reflected
my low and febrile condition, Arncliffe mercifully refrained from
drawing my attention to it. At the end of the six weeks I sat at an
open window, amused by the ghostly refinement of my hands, and
grateful to Providence for sunshine and clean air.

The doctor was a cheery soul, toward whom I felt most strongly drawn,
because he was the only man I ever met in England who smoked my
particular brand of Virginia plug tobacco. I had suffered from the
lack of it since leaving Australia, but this good doctor told me how
to get it in England, from an agent in Yorkshire; and I was deeply
grateful to him for the information. He also told me, as I sat at the
open window, that he did not think much of my stewardship of my own
body.

'Let me tell you, Mr. Freydon, you have been sailing several points
closer to the wind than a man has any right to sail. If