once taken off it, has begun to sprout and burgeon
with new ideas and schemes: but now, for the first time in my life, my
mind and heart remain bare and arid. I seem to have drifted into a
dreary silence. It is not that things have been less beautiful, but
beauty seems to have had no message, no significance for me. The people
that I have seen have come and gone like ghosts and puppets. I have had
no curiosity about them, their occupations and thoughts, their hopes
and lives; it has not seemed worth while to be interested, in a life
which appears so short, and which leads nowhere. It seems morbid to
write thus, but I have not been either morbid or depressed. It has been
an easy life, the life of the last few months, without effort or
dissatisfaction, but without zest. It is a mental tiredness, I suppose.
I have written myself out, and the cistern must fill again. Yet I have
had no feeling of fatigue. It would have been almost better to have had
something to bear; but I am richer than I need be, Maud and the
children have been in perfect health and happiness, I have been well
and strong. I shall hope that the familiar scene, the pleasant
activities of home-life will bring the desire back. I realise how much
the fabric of my life is built upon my writing, and write I must. Well,
I have said enough; the pleasure of these entries is that one can look
back to them, and see the movement of the current of life in a bygone
day. I have an immense mass of arrears to make up, in the form of
letters and business, but I want to survey the ground; and the survey
is not a very happy one this morning; though if I made a list of my
benefits and the reverse, like Robinson Crusoe, the credit side would
be full of good things, and the debit side nearly empty.

September 15, 1888.

It is certainly very sweet to be at home again; to find oneself in
familiar scenes, with all the pretty homely comfortable things waiting
patiently for us to return--pictures, books, rooms, tree, kindly
people. Wright, my excellent gardener, with whom I spent an hour
strolling round the garden to-day, touched me by saying that he was
glad to see me back, and that it had seemed dull without me; he has
done fifty little simple things in our absence, in his tranquil and
faithful way, and is pleased to have them noticed. Alec, who was with
me to-day, delighted me by finding his stolid wooden horse in the
summer-house, rather damp and dishevelled, and almost bur