ibuted by me at the time to the advantages
of my sequestered life. The effect of mental stimulus was not by any
means so evanescent as such things often are, and the Monday following
upon Heron's return to town saw me hard at work upon the book which I
had outlined and begun before my illness.

There followed, in that modest little cottage room of mine, some three
or four months of incessant work at high pressure; long days, and
nights, too, at the table, during which my only exercise and
relaxation in a week would be an occasional five minutes' walk to the
post-office, or a stroll after midnight, when I found the cool night
silence soothed me greatly before going to my bedroom. The doctor's
counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd
moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would
promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I
would live by rote and acquire bucolic health, I told myself.

In most respects that period was thoroughly typical of my life during
the next half dozen years. When the end of a book was reached, there
came the long and wearing process of its revision. Then interviews
with publishers, the correction of proof sheets, the excogitation of
writings for magazines--fuel for the fire that kept my pot a-boiling.
There were intervals of acute mental weariness, and there were
intervals of acute bodily distress. But the intervals of reformed
living, when they came at all, were too brief and spasmodic to make a
stronger or a healthier man of me. My business visits to London were
sometimes made to embrace friendly visits to Sidney Heron's lodgings.
Two or three times I dined with Arncliffe, and very occasionally I was
visited at Dorking by two of the literary journalists who had joined
Arncliffe's staff at the time of his appointment.

With but very few exceptions the critics were very kindly to my
published work, and I apprehend that other writers who read their
reviews of my books must have thought of me as one of the coming men.
(The early nineties was a prolific period in the matter of 'coming
men.') I even indulged that thought myself for a time. But not, I
think, for very long. Like every other writer who ever lived, I would
have liked to reach a large and appreciative audience. But I had the
most lofty scorn for the methods by which I supposed such an
achievement might be accomplished.

For a long time I sincerely believed that it was