As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to Christmas 1847, when there came a change in my life.  On that day, my lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage.  She remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in the time of the old lord, I had been more than fifty years in her service, and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that she had worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather.

I received this magnificent present quite at a loss to find words to thank my mistress with for the honour she had done me.  To my great astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an honour, but a bribe.  My lady had discovered that I was getting old before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days as steward in the house.  I made as good a fight of it against the indignity of taking my ease as I could.  But my mistress knew the weak side of me; she put it as a favour to herself.  The dispute between us ended, after that, in my wiping my eyes, like an old fool, with my new woollen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it.

The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being truly dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which I have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency.  I smoked a pipe and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe.  Before I had occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows:  “To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate.”  I saw my way clear directly.  To-day I was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; to-morrow, on the authority of Robinson Crusoe, I should be all the other way.  Take myself to-morrow while in to-morrow’s humour, and the thing was done.  My mind being relieved in this manner, I went to sleep that night in the character of Lady Verinder’s farm bailiff, and I woke up the next morning in the character of Lady Verinder’s house-steward.  All quite comfortable, and all through Robinson Crusoe!

My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far.  She remarks that it is beautifully written, and every word of it true.  But she points out one objection.  She says what I have done so far isn’t in the least what I was wanted to do.  I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self.  Curious, and quite beyond me to account for.  I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?  If they do, I can feel for them.  In the meantime, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper.  What’s to be done now?  Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time.