Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/11

 who plunged wildly into the excesses of a world so long forsworn, with all the appetite of abstinence, all the reckless self-abandonment of the paid-off man-of-war's man on a spree? No; few people are qualified for recluses. I am proud to be amongst the number.

I live in a desert, but my desert is in the very heart of London. The waste is all round me though; I have taken good care of that. Once, indeed, it blossomed like the rose, for a thousand fertilizing streams trickled through its bright expanse. Do not you as I did. I turned all the streams into one channel, "in the sweet summer-time long ago," and "sat by the river," like those poor fools in the song, and said, "Go to! Now I shall never thirst again!" But in the night there came a landslip from the upper level, and choked the river, turning its course through my neighbour's pastures,