IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE Though I have this bad habit of soliloquising, and indeed am absurd enough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the reader must realise from the beginning that I am still quite a young man.

I talked a little just now as though I were an octogenarian.

Actually, as I said, I am but just gone thirty, and I may reasonably regard life, as the saying is, all before me.

I was a little down-hearted when I wrote yesterday.

Besides, I wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy time.