I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.

Father eternal, ruler of creation, Spirit of life, which moved ere form was made Through the thick darkness covering every nation Light to man's blindness, O be Thou our aid.

If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.

The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale.

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all.