Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

During these last years Jerome spent more time at his farmhouse in Ewelme near Wallingford. Chilvers: an improbable comedy imagined by Jerome K. While reintroducing the same characters in the setting of a foreign bicycle tour the book was nonetheless unable to capture the life-force and historic roots of its predecessor and it enjoyed only a mild success.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humorist best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889).