etters would not like to
read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and references to
him? Here are the volumes of Dahn's _Die Konige der Germanen_: who would
not like to know all he can about the Teutonic conquerors of Rome? And
so on, and so on. To the end I shall be reading--and forgetting. Ah,
that's the worst of it! Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any
time possessed, I might call myself a learned man. Nothing surely is so
bad for the memory as long-enduring worry, agitation, fear. I cannot
preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall,
persistently, rejoicingly. Would I gather erudition for a future life?
Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget. I have the happiness of
the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?



XVIII.


Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise
unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go
downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading,
all day long? Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a
long year?

I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained
world. It would make me miserable, and to what purpose? Yet, having
once looked that way, think of them I must. Oh, you heavy-laden, who at
this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because
there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be
uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only
means of earning bread! Year after year the number of you is multiplied;
you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling,
exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and
heart-breaking!

Innumerable are the men and women now writing for bread, who have not the
least chance of finding in such work a permanent livelihood. They took
to writing because they knew not what else to do, or because the literary
calling tempted them by its independence