e setting out of plates and cutlery, and, even more,
their removal when used; despite the fact that I have had, perhaps,
rather more experience than most men of catering for myself. Hence,
the evening meal is apt to be sketchy; a furtive and far from
creditable performance, with the vessels of the midday meal for its
background.

Then, with a sense of relief, I shut the door upon that episode, and
the evidences thereof, and betake me to the room which is really mine;
where the big hearth is, and the camp-bed, and the writing-table, the
books, and the big Ceylon-made lounge-chair. The first evening pipe is
nearly always good; the second may be flavoured with melancholy, but
yet is seldom unpleasing. The third--there are decent intervals
between--bears me company in bed, with whatever book may be occupying
me at the time. The first hour in the big chair and the first hour in
bed are both exceedingly good when I am anything like well. I would
not say which is the better of the two, lest I provoke a Nemesis. Both
are excellent in their different ways.

Nine times out of ten I can be asleep within half an hour of dousing
the candle, and it is seldom I wake before three hours have passed.
After that come hours of which it is not worth while to say much. They
are far from being one's best hours. And then, more often than not,
will come another blessed two hours, or even more, of unconsciousness,
before the first purple grey forecasts of a new day call me out into
the bush for my morning lesson in serenity: Nature's astringent
message to egoists and all the sedentary, introspective tribe, that
bids us note our own infinite insignificance, our utter and
microscopical unimportance in her great scheme of things, and her
sublime indifference to our individual lives; to say nothing of our
insectile hopes, fears, imaginings, despairs, joys, and other forms of
mental and emotional travail.

It may or may not be evidence of mental exhaustion or indolence, but I
notice that I have experienced here no inclination to read anything
that is new to me. I have read a good deal under this roof, including
a quite surprising amount of fiction; but nothing, I think, that I had
not read before. During bouts of illness here, I have indulged in such
debauches as the rereading of the whole of Hardy, Meredith, Stevenson,
W. E. Henley's poems, and the novels of George Gissing, Joseph Conrad,
and H. G. Wells. Some of the better examples of modern fic