MONEY MATTERS 397 



understand it, scores of people have written to me telling me 

 so — then the losses and the struggles I have had to go 

 through have been a necessary discipline calculated to bring 

 into action whatever faculties I possess. I may be allowed 

 here to give an extract from one of these letters on my literary 

 work, nearly the last I received from my lamented friend 

 F. W. H. Myers. He writes (April 12, 1898) :— 



" I am glad to take this opportunity of telling you some- 

 thing about my relation to one of your books. I write now 

 from bed, having had severe influenzic pneumonia, now going 

 off. For some days my temperature was 105 °, and I was very 

 restless at night — anxious to read, but in too sensitive and 

 fastidious a state to tolerate almost any book. I found that 

 almost the only book which I could read was your ' Malay 

 Archipelago.' Of course I had read it before. In spite of 

 my complete ignorance of natural history there was a certain 

 uniqueness of charm about the book, both moral and literary, 

 which made it deeply congenial in those trying hours. You 

 have had few less instructed readers ; but very few can have 

 dwelt on that simple, manly record with a more profound 

 sympathy." 



Other people, quite strangers, have also told me that they 

 have read it over and over again, and always take it with 

 them on a journey. This is the kind of thing I cannot under- 

 stand. It is true, if I open it myself I can read a chapter 

 with pleasure ; but, then, to me it recalls incidents and feelings 

 almost forgotten, and renews the delights of my wanderings 

 in the wilderness and of my intense interest in the wonderful 

 and beautiful forms of plant, bird, and insect life I was con- 

 tinually meeting with. Others have written in almost equally 

 laudatory terms of my books on " Land Nationalization " and 

 on " Spiritualism," which have introduced them to new 

 spheres of thought; while others, again, have been equally 

 pleased with parts of my " Wonderful Century " and " Man's 

 Place in the Universe." I am thus forced to the conclusion 

 that my books have served to instruct and to give pleasure to 

 a good many readers, and that it is therefore just possible 

 that my life may have been prolonged, and conditions modi- 



