Andrew Lang

Much Darker Days Andrew Lang

If you cannot allow for these, throw the book out of the railway -carriage window! You have paid your money, and to the verdict of your pale morality or absurd sense of art in fiction I am therefore absolutely indifferent. You are too angelic for me; I am too fiendish for you. Let us agree to differ. I say nothing about my boyhood. Twenty-five years ago a poor boy-but no matter. I was that boy! I hurry on to the soaring period of manhood, 'when the strength, the nerve, the intellect is or should be at its height, ' or are or should be at their height, if you must have grammar in a Christmas Annual. My nerve was at its height: I was thirty. Yet, what was I then? A miserable moonstruck mortal, duly entitled to write M. D. of Tarrytown College, Alaska after my name for the title of Doctor is useful in the profession but with no other source of enjoyment or emotional recreation in a cold, casual world. Often and often have I written M. D. after my name, till the glowing pleasure palled, and I have sunk back asking, 'Has life, then, no more than this to offer