This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not a calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.

IX.

For more than six years I trod the pavement, never stepping once upon mother earth—­for the parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of grass.  Then the worst was over.  Say I the worst?  No, no; things far worse were to come; the struggle against starvation has its cheery side when one is young and vigorous.  But at all events I had begun to earn a living; I held assurance of food and clothing for half a year at a time; granted health, I might hope to draw my not insufficient wages for many a twelvemonth.  And they were the wages of work done independently, when and where I would.  I thought with horror of lives spent in an office, with an employer to obey.  The glory of the career of letters was its freedom, its dignity!

The fact of the matter was, of course, that I served, not one master, but a whole crowd of them.  Independence, forsooth!  If my writing failed to please editor, publisher, public, where was my daily bread?  The greater my success, the more numerous my employers.  I was the slave of a multitude.  By heaven’s grace I had succeeded in pleasing (that is to say, in making myself a source of profit to) certain persons who represented this vague throng; for the time, they were gracious to me; but what justified me in the faith that I should hold the ground I had gained?  Could the position of any toiling man be more precarious than mine?  I tremble now as I think of it, tremble as I should in watching some one who walked carelessly on the edge of an abyss.  I marvel at the recollection that for a good score of years this pen and a scrap of paper clothed and fed me and my household, kept me in physical comfort, held at bay all those hostile forces of the world ranged against one who has no resource save in his own right hand.

But I was thinking of the year which saw my first exodus from London.  On an irresistible impulse, I suddenly made up my mind to go into Devon, a part of England I had never seen.  At the end of March I escaped from my grim lodgings, and, before I had time to reflect on the details of my undertaking, I found myself sitting in sunshine at a spot very near to where I now dwell—­before me the green valley of the broadening Exe and the pine-clad ridge of Haldon.  That was one of the moments of my life when I have tasted exquisite joy.  My state of mind was very strange.  Though as boy and youth I had been familiar with the country, had seen much of England’s beauties, it was as though I found myself for the first time before a natural landscape.  Those years of London had obscured all my earlier life; I was like a man town-born and bred, who scarce knows anything but street vistas.  The light, the air, had for me something of the supernatural—­affected me, indeed, only less than at a later time did the