CHAPTER FOUR
At the end of six months, life at “Sans Souci” had developed from a novelty into a habit. It was hard for me to appreciate that I had ever known any form of existence other than this, in which hour followed hour, and day succeeded day, with a kind of pleasurable monotony. The city might have been a thousand miles away instead of barely thirty. I can find no better way of describing the singular change which had come over my life than by recording the fact that my watch ran down at frequent intervals, and that, at intervals almost as frequent, I would forget to wind it up again. This, all said and done, would seem to be the essential difference between town and country life—I mean, the vast significance of time in relation to the one, as compared with its
