The Journal of a Disappointed Man

February 3. This morning on arriving at S. Kensington, went straight to a Chemist's shop, but finding someone inside, I drew back, and went on to another. "Have you any morphia tabloids?" I asked a curly-haired, nice-looking, smiling youth, who leaned with both hands on the counter and looked at me knowingly, as if he had had unlimited experience of would-be morphi nomaniacs. "Yes, plenty of them," he said, fencing. And then waited. "Can you supply me?" I asked, feeling very conscious of myself. He smiled once more, shook his head and said it was contrary to the Defence of the Realm Act. I made a sorry effort to appear ingenuous, and he said: "Of course, it is only a palliative." With a solemn countenance intended to indicate pain I answered: "Yes, but palliatives are very necessary sometimes," and I walked out of the hateful shop discomfited. February 6. Am busy re-writing,[1] editing and bowdlerising my journals for publication against the time when I shall have gone the way of all flesh. No one else would prepare it for publication if I don't. Reading it through again, I see what a remarkable book I have written. If only they will publish it! February 7. Chinese Lanterns The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another moon--the full moon itself--yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.