's work until I fall asleep in the sleep of utter happy weariness.
And I'm up and at it, before washing, at daylight. But I was a carpenter
and housepainter first.

Well, it had been a long, close day, and I was very dirty and tired, but
with the energy and restlessness of healthy, happy tiredness when work
is unfinished. But I was out of two-inch nails, and the shops were shut.

Then it struck me to start up the copper and have a real warm bath after
my own heart and ideas. The bathroom is outside, next the wash-house and
copper. There were plenty of splinters and ends of softwood that were
mine by right of purchase and labour. My landlady is, and always has
been, sensitive on the subject of firewood. She'll buy anything else to
make the house comfortable and beautiful. She has been known to buy a
piano for one of her nieces and burn rubbish in the stove the same day.
I knew she was uneasy about the softwood odds and ends, but I couldn't
help that--she'd still be sentimental about them if she had a stack of
firewood as big as the house. There's at least one thing that most folk
hate to buy--mine's boot-laces or bone studs, so long as I can make pins
or inked string do.

I put a bucket of water in the copper, started a fire under that sent
sparks out of the wash-house flue at an alarming rate, filled the copper
to the brim, and, in the absence of a lid, covered it with a piece of
flattened galvanized iron I had.

I tacked the side edge of a strip of canvas to the matchboard wall along
over the inner edge of the bath, fastened a short piece of gas-pipe to
the outer edge, with pieces of string through holes made in it, and let
it hang down over the bath, leaving a hole at the head for my head and
shoulders. I was going to have a long, comfortable, and utterly lazy and
drowsy hot water and steam bath, you know.

I fastened a piece of clothes-line round and over the head of the bath,
and twisted an old toilet-table cover and a towel round it where it
sagged into the bath, for a head rest-also to be soaped for where I
couldn't get at my back with my hands.

I went up to my room for some things, and it struck me to arrange two
chairs by the bed--candle and matches and tobacco on one side, and a
pile of Jack London, Kipling, and Yankee magazines on the other, with
the last _Lone Hand_ and _Bulletin_ on top.

Going down with pyjamas, towel, and soap, it struck me to have a kettle
and a saucepan full of water on the stove