My head is never so busy as when I am occupied with monotonous work. As I cut peats or walk on the hill a multitude of scarcely related thoughts voice themselves in my brain, and I, like a half-attentive eavesdropper, hear my own mind rehearse the hundred shifts and stratagems, the alternating successes and failures which now elate and again depress us as if it was another’s voice I heard telling a half-fabulous story. And all the while I am alert for signs in the country, deer with heads in the air, storm-clouds in the sky, with an attention which seems closer and readier and more instinctive when half of my mind is occupied than when I watch and listen with each sense trained to alertness. I have found myself dropping flat on my face in the heather, and I had to recall my wits from day-dreaming, and reason and stare before I knew that it was a stag’s horn on the skyline which warned me.

No doubt our continual care to be vigilant has sharpened my senses and quickened my responses; perhaps a sixth sense has developed which makes me act automatically; I feel that the present state of mind I carry with me to the moss and the hill has deeper roots than a new habit. When we came here first we were always over-anxious. I strained my eyes watching for men while I hunted beasts. We were novices in stealth, too bold and too timorous by uneasy turns, falling from ecstasy to despair upon a trifle. We have learned soberness. Our fears and our self-satisfaction cannot now overthrow each other in the twinkling of an eye, nor make our life a din of contending emotions. We take each moment’s task at its momentary value. We are not ready to feel that the entire future hangs on the balance of the precarious present.

I find myself becoming more matter of fact every day. When I rehearse the tale of recent weeks, as I go to stalk in the forest, it is the events of these weeks I remember, seldom the feelings that accompanied them, though I am aware that when the events occurred our joy and pride in them, if they were successful, our misery, if they betrayed us, seemed to fill the world.

I think I am growing contented. I have been struggling against contentment for many days. I scourged myself, saying our plight was desperate; the hands of all men were against us; the future had no light; we lived on the edge of a world gone mad; our house was forfeit and we were in truth homeless outcasts. The world was at war.

I strove in vain to foster discontent. No sooner had I begun working in the peat-moss than my labour there used all my strength, and my head refused to vex itself with future woes or other men’s grief.