That I have a right to do so I have fully satisfied my own conscience, an exceptionally fussy one.  Of the four joint authors, he whom I call “MacShaughnassy” has laid aside his title to all things beyond six feet of sun-scorched ground in the African veldt; while from him I have designated “Brown” I have borrowed but little, and that little I may fairly claim to have made my own by reason of the artistic merit with which I have embellished it.  Indeed, in thus taking a few of his bald ideas and shaping them into readable form, am I not doing him a kindness, and thereby returning good for evil?  For has he not, slipping from the high ambition of his youth, sunk ever downward step by step, until he has become a critic, and, therefore, my natural enemy?  Does he not, in the columns of a certain journal of large pretension but small circulation, call me “’Arry” (without an “H,” the satirical rogue), and is not his contempt for the English-speaking people based chiefly upon the fact that some of them read my books?  But in the days of Bloomsbury lodgings and first-night pits we thought each other clever.

From “Jephson” I hold a letter, dated from a station deep in the heart of the Queensland bush. “Do what you like with it, dear boy,” the letter runs, “so long as you keep me out of it.  Thanks for your complimentary regrets, but I cannot share them.  I was never fitted for a literary career.  Lucky for me, I found it out in time.  Some poor devils don’t.  (I’m not getting at you, old man.  We read all your stuff, and like it very much.  Time hangs a bit heavy, you know, here, in the winter, and we are glad of almost anything.) This life suits me better.  I love to feel my horse between my thighs, and the sun upon my skin.  And there are the youngsters growing up about us, and the hands to look after, and the stock.  I daresay it seems a very commonplace unintellectual life to you, but it satisfies my nature more than the writing of books could ever do.  Besides, there are too many authors as it is.  The world is so busy reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking.  You’ll tell me, of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon of the Press.  You come out here, old man, and sit as I do sometimes for days and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an upheaved island of earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky, and you will know that they are not.  What a man thinks—­really thinks—­goes down into him and grows in silence.  What a man writes in books are the thoughts that he wishes to be thought to think.”

Poor Jephson! he promised so well at one time.  But he always had strange notions.

CHAPTER I

When, on returning home one evening, after a pipe party at my friend Jephson’s, I informed my wife that I was going to write a novel, she expressed herself as pleased with the idea.  She said she had often wondered I had never thought of doing so before.  “Look,” she added, “how silly all the novels are nowadays; I’m sure you could write one.”  (Ethelbertha intended to be complimentary, I am convinced; but there is a looseness about her mode of expression which, at times, renders her meaning obscure.)