I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man not very proficient in the art:  it is seventeen years, seventeen, seventeen ... ah!  And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either:  I have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if the spelling of some of them is queer.  My brain has been thinking inarticulately perhaps, all these years:  and the English words and letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of tackling them.  Or perhaps it is only my fancy:  for that I have fancies I know.

But what to write?  The history of those seventeen years could not be put down, my good God:  at least, it would take me seventeen more to do it.  If I were to detail the building of the palace alone, and how it killed me nearly, and how I twice fled from it, and had to return, and became its bounden slave, and dreamed of it, and grovelled before it, and prayed, and raved, and rolled; and how I forgot to make provision on the west side for the contraction and expansion of the gold in the colder weather and the heats of summer, and had to break down nine months’ work, and how I cursed Thee, how I cursed Thee; and how the lake of wine evaporated faster than the conduits replenished it, and the three journeys which I had to take to Constantinople for shiploads of wine, and my frothing despairs, till I had the thought of placing the reservoir in the platform; and how I had then to break down the south side of the platform to the very bottom, and of the month-long nightmare of terror that I had lest the south side of the palace would undergo subsidence; and how the petrol failed, and of the three-weeks’ search for petrol along the coast; and how, after list-rubbing all the jet, I found that I had forgotten the necessary rouge for polishing; and how, in the third year, I found the fluate, which I had for water-proofing the pores of the platform-stone, nearly all leaked away in the Speranza’s hold, and I had to get silicate of soda at Gallipoli; and how, after two years’ observation, I had to come to the conclusion that the lake was leaking, and discovered that this Imbros sand was not suitable for mixing with the skin of Portland cement which covered the cement concrete, and had to substitute sheet-bitumen in three places; and how I did all, all for the sake of God, thinking:  ’I will work, and be a good man, and cast Hell from me:  and when I see it stand finished, it will be an Altar and a Testimony to me, and I shall find peace, and be well’:  and how I have been cheated—­seventeen years, long years of my life—­for there is no God; and how my plasterers’-hair failed me, and I had to use flock, hessian, scrym, wadding, wood-street paving-blocks,