For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last.

What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say.
It has come; and, with it--a more serious condition--perhaps a little leisure.

I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered with a few links of the convict's chain.
The wish is realized.

It is a little late, O! my pretty insects! I greatly fear that the peach is offered to me when I am beginning to have no teeth wherewith to eat it.

Yes, it is a little late: the wide horizons of the outset have shrunk into a low and stifling canopy, more and more straitened day by day.