I ventured to remonstrate with him about the cigarette, but he said gravely that he had given up thinking about his health, it was so very inferior, and that he had come to the conclusion that nothing in moderation made him either better or worse; “and an occasional cigarette,” he said, “adds so much to my general serenity, that I feel sure it is perfectly justifiable.”

I had a very delightful week there.  He talked a good deal, when he was in the mood, about the books he had been reading and the thoughts he had been thinking; but his physical languor at times, especially in the mornings, was very painful to see.  He did not get up till very late, and complained to me more than once of a terrible listlessness and dejection to which he was liable during the earlier part of the day.  But he spoke little of his own sufferings, or rather malaise, which I gathered was very great, only saying once or twice, “It is fortunate how habituated one gets to things, even to enduring discomfort.  If I can only get my mind occupied, it hardly ever distracts me now.”  And again—­“I think the only really valuable experiences are those that we can not lay down and take up at will, but which continue with us, invariable, unaltering, day after day, meeting us at every moment and tempering every mood.”  And once—­“In spite of everything, I would not for an instant go back.  I have every now and then, on breezy sunny mornings or after rain, an intense gush of yearning for the peculiar unconscious delight—­the index of perfect physical health—­of childhood; but I never deliberately wish that things were otherwise.  I enjoy nature more, far more, than ever I did.  The signs of spring are a deep and constant joy to me.  I can lie down by the stream, and watch the water flowing and the flowers bending and stirring and the animals that run busily about, and be absolutely absorbed, without a thought of myself or even other people.  This I never could do before, and it has been sent me, I often think, as a kind of alleviation.  I have had it ever since I settled here at Tredennis; and altogether I feel the stronger and the more content for all this suffering and the inevitable end, which can not be far off.  No; I wouldn’t change, even with you, my dear Chris, or even with Edward”—­as that superb piece of physical vitality crossed the lawn.

“When I first came,” he told me, “quite at first, I seemed to have lost my hold of nature—­to be discordant and out of joint with her.  On those bright still mornings we so often have here in the early summer, I seemed to be only a sad spectator, not a part of it all.  The sunset over the hills there, and the deliberate red glow of the creek, all seemed to mock me.  Even Edward, fond as he was of me, seemed to have no real connection with me.  I was isolated and despairing.  But very gradually, like the dispersing of a cloud, it came back.  I began again to feel myself a performer in the drama, not a gloomy spectator of it—­there must