Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/143

131 art, in the low, red-leathered armchair under the green-shaded lamp; till eleven, dumb-bells, bed and sleep. The next morning Professor Strachan and I began our work.

My Journal takes out a new lease on that evening, (It seems to have given me pleasure, though no great pleasure, I fancy, to record events or conversations, or to deliver some few of my impressions of present people and things in that way. Perhaps there was some small necessity upon me to write these things. I cannot say.)

Here is from a week later:

'We are often almost in despair over the manuscripts. In the first place the writing is fearful. He seems to have thought it quite enough to write the first three or four letters of a word, for the rest is nearly always comprised in a twirl. Now this is aggravating to the son of man. Then, the Journal is broken off by chance notes, and these notes have references to other note-books, and so on. I never was made for editing other people's books. I lack patience, and the worst of it is, that I don't believe that anyone can do anything worth calling thing without patience. The Professor is Job and Griselda put into one.

'After a week's hard work we have arranged the stuff,—I should say materials or notes, I suppose,—into something like chronological order, having separated the whole mass into three almost equal parts: to wit, The Travels in Palestine and parts of Arabia, The Expedition from South Africa upwards, and the last Expedition to Injiji. 'A sheet was pasted on to the inside of the cover of the first note-book of the "Journal through Palestine and parts of Arabia," which we are going, we think, to use as an introduction to the two first expeditions. It is as follows: This Journal through Palestine and parts of Arabia was undertaken by me in 18—, with a view to helping by details, principally geographical, my dear friend the Rev. Charles Blake, in the compilation