exacting personal needs demanded the luxury of coffee. Pure and
unadulterated, I quaffed it freely, and (being no politician) neither
did it enhance my wisdom nor enable me to see through anything with
half-shut eyes. Yet did it make me too glad. Under such vibrant, emphatic
fingers my frail nerves twanged all too shrilly, and of necessity coffee
was abandoned--not without passing pangs--in favour of a beverage direct
from Nature and untinctured by any of the vital principles of vegetables.
Thus is economy evolved, not as a foppish fad but as due obedience to
the polite but imperious decrees of Nature.

And having confessed--far too literally, I fear--to so much on the
expenditure side of the simple life in tropical Queensland, it might be
anticipated that the items of income would be stated to the completion of
the story. The affairs of the busy world were discarded, not upon the
strength of large accumulated savings or the possession of means by
inheritance or by the success of investments or by mere luck, but upon
merely imperative, theoretic anticipations upon the cost of living the
secluded life. We had little in reserve, how little it would be
unbecoming to say. Our theories proved delusive, though not bewildering.
Some of the things abandoned with unphilosophic ease at the outset proved
under the test of experience to be essential. Others deemed to be needful
to desperation were forsaken unconsciously. Under the light of experience
forecasts as to actual requirements were quite as vain as our
preconceptions contrariwise. No single item which was not subjected to
regulation. Without imposing any more impatient figures, be it said,
then, that, though all preliminary estimates of ways and means underwent
summary evolution, the financial end was close upon that on which we had
calculated. Compulsion had all to do with the result. During each of the
years of Island life our total income has never exceeded L100 and has
generally fallen considerably below that amount. From the beginning we