Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/149

Rh  "P.S.—I shall be in to-morrow night early by eight. If you care to go a walk with me then, I shall be very happy to go a walk with you. I hope you have not forgotten Minnie.—Yours truly,— (Rosebud.)

The Journal follows:

'The work is much easier now, though not particularly interesting. Brooke, I must say, seems to have taken a good deal more pains over his own particular mania than over his friend's. Great parts of this second Journal are continuous narrative that (thank God) require nothing on our part. Strachan thinks my old friends Parker, Innes, and Co., will be the best publishers to send it to when it's done. Here is a copy of my preface.—But I can't trouble to do it now. I only said that all the credit of the editing of the book was due to Strachan, that I had only, etc., etc., etc. There was nothing else to be said.

'He calculates finishing it by about the middle of July. O Destiny!'

 

next day after lunch, I went for a walk to Hampstead, and wandered about there, my thoughts alternating between the beautiful sweet nature about me and the past days of my first London weeks, till half-past six. Then I remembered that Rosy would be waiting for me at eight. It used to take me something under an hour to get from Maitland Street to Hampstead. It was now half-past six. What to do with myself for an hour?—from seven to eight, that was. Then my thoughts turned off in memory: memory of the many times I had come marching along this very pavement in those first London days whose second half was an age of weariness and woe. Here was the very corner at which I stood that dreary day. Was it all a dream? 'I stand still here to-day,' I said to myself, 'as I stood still here that day, and look at the brown cracked concrete of the low wall and the black sooty rails that top it. The windows are lampless too, as they were when I first stood still here. Will the left one light up suddenly too as it