O, beautiful is love, and to be free
Is beautiful, and beautiful are friends,
Love, freedom, comrades, surely make amends
For all these thorns through which we walk to death.
God, let us breathe your beauty, with our breath.
--JOHN MASEFIELD.

THIS last chapter must differ from any that have preceded
it. In it I try to find space for some record of things I cannot
quite leave out, incidents I think worth recording. I can give
them only in outline, and the dates of their happenings are wide
apart. So it must be a scrappy chapter, I fear.

And first, as to how this autobiography has been put together.
It is my own work entirely. I have sought advice from no one.
I have showed nothing but the first chapter to any one, and
that to but a few friends, before the manuscript was accepted by
the publisher. I am therefore responsible, and I alone, for any
mistakes that it may contain. I had planned to write at greater
length of the out-of-doors side of my life. It has meant a great
deal to me--of my interesting journey through the Indian
country in the '60's, and forty years later of my stay in equa-
torial Africa. But if my book is to reach the hands I want
it in, it must not be too expensive, and I cannot find space
for an account of these adventurous days. I have devoted
most mornings for five years to writing and re-writing it,
and for the last half year I have closed my study door on all
comers for several hours daily. Ever since my return from
Africa, I have spent all my leisure sorting and annotating a
large mass of correspondence, and my notebooks, kept since
1873, when I began my clerical life as curate of St. Giles',
Norwich, England. I had a mass of material to choose from.
I formed the habit of making daily notes of occurrences, of

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