time I should have food and shelter.  It would happen, to be sure, that in hot noons of August my thoughts wandered to the sea; but so impossible was the gratification of such desire that it never greatly troubled me.  At times, indeed, I seem all but to have forgotten that people went away for holiday.  In those poor parts of the town where I dwelt, season made no perceptible difference; there were no luggage-laden cabs to remind me of joyous journeys; the folk about me went daily to their toil as usual, and so did I. I remember afternoons of languor, when books were a weariness, and no thought could be squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake myself to one of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable sense of change.  Heavens, how I laboured in those days!  And how far I was from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion!  That came later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from bad air, bad food and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire for countryside and sea-beach—­and for other things yet more remote.  But in the years when I toiled hardest and underwent what now appear to me hideous privations, of a truth I could not be said to suffer at all.  I did not suffer, for I had no sense of weakness.  My health was proof against everything, and my energies defied all malice of circumstance.  With however little encouragement, I had infinite hope.  Sound sleep (often in places I now dread to think of) sent me fresh to the battle each morning, my breakfast, sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and a cup of water.  As human happiness goes, I am not sure that I was not then happy.

Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by companionship.  London has no pays latin, but hungry beginners in literature have generally their suitable comrades, garreteers in the Tottenham Court Road district, or in unredeemed Chelsea; they make their little vie de Boheme, and are consciously proud of it.  Of my position, the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster; I shrank from casual acquaintance, and, through the grim years, had but one friend with whom I held converse.  It was never my instinct to look for help, to seek favour for advancement; whatever step I gained was gained by my own strength.  Even as I disregarded favour so did I scorn advice; no counsel would I ever take but that of my own brain and heart.  More than once I was driven by necessity to beg from strangers the means of earning bread, and this of all my experiences was the bitterest; yet I think I should have found it worse still to incur a debt to some friend or comrade.  The truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a “member of society.”  For me, there have always been two entities—­myself and the world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile.  Am I not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social order?