m not going to tell
you the yarn--and then, as my arithmetic is particularly lax, Lloyd had
to go over all my calculations; and then, as I had changed the amount
of money, he had to go over all _his_ as to the amount of the lay; and
altogether, a bank could be run with less effusion of figures than it
took to shore up a single chapter of a measly yarn. However, it's done,
and I have but one more, or at the outside two, to do, and I am Free!
and can do any damn thing I like.

Before falling on politics, I shall give you my day. Awoke somewhere
about the first peep of day, came gradually to, and had a turn on the
verandah before 5.55, when "the child" (an enormous Wallis Islander)
brings me an orange; at 6, breakfast; 6.10, to work; which lasts till,
at 10.30, Austin comes for his history lecture; this is rather
dispiriting, but education must be gone about in faith--and charity,
both of which pretty nigh failed me to-day about (of all things)
Carthage; 11, luncheon; after luncheon in my mother's room, I read
Chapter XXIII. of _The Wrecker_, then Belle, Lloyd, and I go up and make
music furiously till about 2 (I suppose), when I turn into work again
till 4; fool from 4 to half-past, tired out and waiting for the bath
hour; 4.30, bath; 4.40, eat two heavenly mangoes on the verandah, and
see the boys arrive with the pack-horses; 5, dinner; smoke, chat on
verandah, then hand of cards, and at last at 8 come up to my room with a
pint of beer and a hard biscuit, which I am now consuming, and as soon
as they are consumed I shall turn in.

Such are the innocent days of this ancient and outworn sportsman; to-day
there was no weeding, usually there is however, edged in somewhere. My
books for the moment are a crib to Phaedo, and the second book of
Montaigne; and a little while back I was reading Frederic Harrison,
_Choice of Books_, etc.--very good indeed, a great deal of sense and
knowledge in the volume, and some very true stuff, _contra_ Carlyle,
about the eighteenth century. A hideous idea came over me that perhaps
Harrison is now getting _old_. Perhaps you are. Perhaps I am. Oh, this
infidelity must be stared firmly down. I am about twenty-three--say
twenty-eight; you about thirty, or, by'r lady, thirty-four; and as
Harrison belongs to the same generation, there is no good bothering
about him.

Here has just been a fine alert; I gave my wife a dose of chlorodyne.
"Something wrong," says she. "Nonsense," said I. "Embrocation