could only be learned by becoming as far as possible one of them. The
story of his struggles to do so in his life in Bermondsey, and of
his journey to Australia in the steerage of a German liner and of his
roughing it there, always with the same object in view, cannot be told
here. The first outcome of it all was the writing of his book, _The
Lord of All Good Life_. Of this book he says, in a letter to his
friend Tom Allen of the Oxford and Bermondsey Mission:

"The book I regard as my child. I feel quite absurdly about it; to me
it is the sudden vision of what lots of obscure things really meant.
It is coming out of dark shadows into--moonlight ... I would have you
to realize that it was written spontaneously in a burst, in six weeks,
without any consultation of authorities or any revision to speak of.
I had tried and tried, but without success. Then suddenly everything
cleared up. To myself, the writing of it was an illumination. I did
not write it laboriously and with calculation or because I wanted to
write a book and be an author. I wrote it because problems that had
been troubling me suddenly cleared up and because writing down the
result was to me the natural way of getting everything straight in my
own mind."

The book was written not away in the peace of the country, nor in the
comparative quiet of a certain sunny little sitting-room I know of,
looking on to a leafy back garden in Kensington, where Donald often
sat and smoked and wrote, but in a little flat in a dull tenement
house in a grey street in Bermondsey, where I remember visiting him
with a cousin of his.

Here the Student lived like a lord--for Bermondsey! For he possessed
two flats, one for his "butler"--a sick-looking young man in list