we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law.
Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for our neighbours--LEX
ARMATA--armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a crapulous human
ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The judge, though in a way an
admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or
the priest. Above all, the doctor--the doctor and the purulent trash
and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure air--from the neighbourhood of
a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine--unadulterated wine, and the
reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works
of nature--these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best
religious comforts. Devote yourself to these. Hark! there are the bells
of Bourron (the wind is in the North, it will be fair). How clear and
airy is the sound! The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind
attuned to silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the
heart! Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these sensations;
and yet you yourself perceive they are a part of health. Did you
remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of
nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather
for, ourselves if we lived in the locality.'

*****

The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days
upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not
so the Beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct--the instinct
of self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported by
the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries
of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks.
There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a
slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those
hours when the words come and the phrases balance themselves--EVEN TO
BEGIN. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the
book shall be accomplished! For so long a time the slant is to continue
unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at
command the same quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are
to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous!

*****

What is this fortunate circumstance, my friend? inquired Anastasie, not
heeding his protest, which was of daily recurrence.

'That we have no children, my beautiful,' replied th