So, if you will not accept all this as an explanation of what you are
pleased to call my "desertion," may I humbly and reluctantly put up a
plea for my health, and hope for a sympathetic hearing?

If I am to live much longer,--and I am on the road down the hill, you
know,--I demand of Life my physical well-being. I want a robust old
age. I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in
town,--city-born and city-bred though I am. I used to think, and I
continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did
not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems
to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my
habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet. In the
simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I expect
to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me.
I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle. No one ever dies up on this
hill, I am told, except of hard drink. Judging by my experience with
workmen here, not always of that. I never saw so many very old, very
active, robust people in so small a space in all my life as I have seen
here.

Are you answered?

Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am
shirking--well, I am sorry. It seems to me that, from another point of
view, I am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room--
getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and me,
was getting trying for my mental complexion. If I have blundered, the
consequences be on my own head. My hair could hardly be whiter--that's
something. Besides, retreat is not cut off. I have sworn no eternal