amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a sense of
over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be adequate, but for
the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain longitude, once won,
cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars and the shape of your earth
are the witnesses of your gain; whereas a handful of pages, no matter
how much you have made them your own, are at best but an obscure and
questionable spoil. Here they are. "Failure"--"Astonishing": take your
choice; or perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces
of paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the sunshine.

"How do you do?"

It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard nothing--no
rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment before a sort of
premonition of evil; I had the sense of an inauspicious presence--just
that much warning and no more; and then came the sound of the voice and
the jar as of a terrible fall from a great height--a fall, let us say,
from the highest of the clouds floating in gentle procession over the
fields in the faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself
up quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair stunned
and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out of
one world and flung down into another--perfectly civil.

"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"

That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly true
reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of confessions a la
Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start
upsetting furniture, or throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow