perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterize other wise
the intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will
and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day,
away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really
lovable and gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be
found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage
round Cape Horn. For that, too, is the wrestling of men with the might
of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without the
amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a sense of
overmatched 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 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