le, when they have come, have been worse, I
think, than those of earlier years.

But, none the less, without feeling it as yet, I may be building up a
better general condition in this quiet life; and the bitterly sharp
attacks that seize me may represent no more than a working off of
arrears of penalties. I hope it may be so, for persistent ill-health
is a dismal thing. But, as against that, I think I am sufficiently
philosophic--how often that blessed word is abused by disgruntled
mankind--to avoid hopes and desires of too extravagant a sort, and, by
that token, to be safeguarded from the sharper forms of
disappointment.

Contentment depends, I apprehend, not upon obtaining possession of
this or that, but upon the wise schooling of one's desires and
requirements. My aims and desires in life--behind the achievement of
which I have always fancied I discerned Contentment sitting as a
goddess, from whose beneficent hands come all rewards--have naturally
varied with the passing years. In youth, I suppose, first place was
given to Position. Later, Art stood highest; later, again, Intellect;
then Morality; and, finally. Peace, Tranquillity--surely the most
modest, and therefore practical and hopeful of all these goals.

VII

The portion of my days here in the bush which I like best (when no
bodily ill plagues me) is the very early morning. Directly daylight
comes, while yet the sun's Australian throne is vacant--all hung about
in cool, pearly draperies--I slip a waterproof over my pyjamas, having
first rolled up the legs of these garments and thrust my feet into
rubber half-boots, and wander out across the verandah, down through
the garden patch, over the road, with its three-inch coating of sandy
dust, and into the bush beyond, where every tiny leaf and twig and
blade of grass holds treasure trove and nutriment, in the form of
glistening dewdrops.

The early morning in the coastal belt of New South Wales is rapture
made visible and responsive to one's faculties of touch, and smell,
and hearing. And yet---no. I believe I have used the wrong word. It
would be rapture, belike, in a Devon coomb, or on a Hampshire hill-top.
Here it is hardly articulate or sprightly enough for rapture.
Rather, I should say, it is the perfection of pellucid serenity. It
lacks the full-throated eternal youthfulness of dawn in the English
countryside; but, for calmly exquisite serenity, it is matchless. To
my mind it is grateful as cold wa