one. I drifted on to the Bay of Islands and to Hokianga as if I were looking for something to pull me up.
“One night in a little pub at Hokianga I struck an Englishman, a strange chap. I don’t know what he had fled from. I never got near him. I can’t account for him at all. He didn’t drink to excess. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t have anything to do with any woman about. He apparently had a little money. He asked me to go home with him. I went. I stayed with him for four months. I was ill at first and he looked after me. Then I worked on his run with him. He was fattening cattle and clearing quite a large place. He wasn’t far from the Hokianga harbour. You know it? Well, I used to wander about it at night, and I think that it more than anything else brought me back to the world. I’d carried a pistol for some time, and had come near to using it. One night I sat on a little beach. It was a full moon and that harbour was the spirit of beauty itself. And I told myself it was a grand night and a grand place to die with or to come to some conclusion about living. It was funny how I did it. One can be such an incurable idiot! I sat down, and on one side of me I made a heap of pebbles each named with something I cared to live for, books I had not read, places I wanted to see, and so on, and on the other I put the stones named for the reasons for not living. It will amuse you to know I called one of them ‘women.’ Well, I was astonished to see that the arguments for going on were much more numerous than the arguments for shooting myself on the spot. I threw the pistol into the harbour and decided to go on. It gave me a curious feeling for days to go about thinking that I might have been dead, and that the thing was in my hands, and that I had put a real issue up to myself. I had drifted along so much of my life. I had a strange exhilaration. And so
