I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the things I had in hand more or less.  It is perfectly clear to me that I did none of them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other than excellently.  I was attempting the study of no less than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to these.  I was reading right and left in every direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction.  From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a ’coup de main,’ or sat down before it for a prolonged siege.  There was occasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly gave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors were few.  I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, and the relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knew pretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committed myself to the task of reading it.  Always I read for pleasure, for the delight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very different thing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as I do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts.  There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read; I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time.

My day began about seven o’clock, in the printing-office, where it took me till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five.  Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work with their hands for their dinners.  In the afternoon I went back and corrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case for the next day.  At two or three o’clock I was free, and then I went home and began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book.  We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till I went to bed at ten or eleven.  I cannot think of any time when I did not go gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as well as a high privilege.

But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which was not yet known as nervous prostration.  When I could not sleep after my studies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks of hypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was not the day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that I should leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion that the case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure.  I passed days in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myself in heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesome and very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write.  No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause, and to be sicklied over with the pale cast