no great task for me to have all that was
amiss set right.

The two rooms I laid out in a widely different manner--my own tastes are
of a Spartan turn, and the outer chamber was so planned as to accord with
them. An oil-stove by Rippingille of Birmingham furnished me with the
means of cooking; while two great bags, the one of flour, and the other
of potatoes, made me independent of all supplies from without. In diet I
had long been a Pythagorean, so that the scraggy, long-limbed sheep which
browsed upon the wiry grass by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from
their new companion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard;
while a square table, a deal chair and a truckle-bed completed the list
of my domestic fittings. At the head of my couch hung two unpainted
shelves--the lower for my dishes and cooking utensils, the upper for the
few portraits which took me back to the little that was pleasant in the
long, wearisome toiling for wealth and for pleasure which had marked the
life I had left behind.

If this dwelling-room of mine were plain even to squalor, its poverty was
more than atoned for by the luxury of the chamber which was destined to
serve me as my study. I had ever held that it was best for my mind to be
surrounded by such objects as would be in harmony with the studies which
occupied it, and that the loftiest and most ethereal conditions of
thought are only possible amid surroundings which please the eye and
gratify the senses. The room which I had set apart for my mystic studies
was set forth in a style as gloomy and majestic as the thoughts and
aspirations with which it was to harmonise. Both walls and ceilings were
covered with a paper of the richest and glossiest black, on which was
traced a lurid and arabesque pattern of dead gold. A black velvet
curtain covered the single diamond-paned window; while a thick, yielding
carpet of the same material prevented the sound of my own footfalls, as I
paced backward and forward, from breaking the current of my thought.
Along the cornices ran gold rods, from which depended six pictures, all
of the sombre and imaginative caste, which chimed best with my fancy.

And yet it was destined that ere ever I reached this quiet harbour I
should learn that I was still one of humankind, and that it is an ill
thing to strive to break the bond which binds us to our fellows. It was
but two nights before the date I had fixed upon for my change of
dwelling, when I