always in those days had an idea that I was equal to writing a very good play.  It is not, I believe, a very uncommon persuasion.  I knew there is nothing a man can do outside legitimate business transactions that has such opulent possibilities, and very probably that biased my opinion.  I had, indeed, got into the habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserve put by for a rainy day.  That rainy day had come, and I set to work.

I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than I had supposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have a pied-a-terre while it was in hand that I came to Lympne.  I reckoned myself lucky in getting that little bungalow.  I got it on a three years’ agreement.  I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the play was in hand I did my own cooking.  My cooking would have shocked Mrs. Bond.  And yet, you know, it had flavour.  I had a coffee-pot, a sauce-pan for eggs, and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages and bacon—­such was the simple apparatus of my comfort.  One cannot always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.  For the rest I laid in an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a trustful baker came each day.  It was not, perhaps, in the style of Sybaris, but I have had worse times.  I was a little sorry for the baker, who was a very decent man indeed, but even for him I hoped.

Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne.  It is in the clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea.  In very wet weather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at times the postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his route with boards upon his feet.  I never saw him doing so, but I can quite imagine it.  Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that make up the present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the worst of the clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the district.  I doubt if the place would be there at all, if it were not a fading memory of things gone for ever.  It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus Lemanis, and now the sea is four miles away.  All down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow to the north.  I used to stand on the hill and think of it all, the galleys and legions, the captives and officials, the women and traders, the speculators like myself, all the swarm and tumult that came clanking in and out of the harbour.  And now just a few lumps of rubble on a grassy slope, and a sheep or two—­and I. And where the port had been were the levels of the marsh, sweeping round in a broad curve to distant Dungeness, and dotted here and there with tree clumps and the church towers of old medical towns that are following Lemanis now towards extinction.