craving for adventurous physical employment—in part, as he suggests, hereditary—was partly born of an instinct that this way lay salvation.
When at last he returned to depressing Sydney he came, as his father says, to ‘a house of gloom.’ He was unemployed, physically unexercised: mental troubles reacted on his body, and bodily languor on his mind. Always he smoked, smoked, and his heart beat more slowly; till he would sit for hours with his head bent down—speechless, pulseless, almost lifeless. On previous occasions he had roused himself to end a similar lethargy by change of living scene and occupation. This time the conditions were unfavourable; the disease too desperate for any but a desperate remedy. And Boake changed Life for Death.
It must be remembered that Boake received little more than a fair middle-class education (as that phrase was understood in the seventies) and left school at the age of seventeen. His parents were people of more than average intelligence, but with no exceptional culture. His father strung undistinguished rhymes: his mother had literary tastes, but no literary talents. Consequently the rough form of most of Boake's compositions is not surprising. In syntax and spelling he did not often blunder; but he was careless in punctuation, and in his letters—scribbled, of course, only for friendly eyes—the sentences run on with hardly a pause. For convenience I have punctuated the quotations
