Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/95

88 this life for ten years after the death of Vico Mathurin—led it happily, yes, very happily in the main, although at no time in it did I ever make money enough to pay for more than the simplest fare, the hardest couch, the thinnest draught of wine. But happiness depends so much upon one's self. That is a threadbare saying of the preachers. Yes I know. But it is true, for all that. So long as one has no regret, one can be happy; and as for me, I envied no man. This was ignorance, no doubt. If I had ever known what wealth and its powers and its pleasures were like, no doubt I should have hungered for them like the rest of men. But I had never known, and it was not in my nature merely to be jealous of possession. If I have been crippled, I should have passionately envied those who still walked at will straightly and swiftly whither they would. But it was not in me, whilst I could march as I pleased, strongly and fast through the seeding grasses, over the sun-swept plains, amongst the red and gold leaves of autumn and over the white fields of the midwinter snows—it was not in me then, I say, to envy the men who rolled on wheels or were borne by horses. It