only act of resolution of his life. It was rendered possible by his
morbid, his actually pusillanimous dread of poverty; he doesn't feel
safe without half a million between him and starvation. Meanwhile he had
turned from a young man into an old man; his health was broken, his
spirit was jaded, and I imagine, to do him justice, that he began to
feel certain natural, filial longings for this dear American mother of
us all. They say the most hopeless truants and triflers have come to it.
He came to it, at all events; he packed up his books and pictures and
gimcracks, and bade farewell to Europe. This house which he now occupies
belonged to his wife's estate. She had, for sentimental reasons of her
own, commended it to his particular care. On his return he came to see
it, liked it, turned a parcel of carpenters and upholsterers into it,
and by inhabiting it for nine years transformed it into the perfect
dwelling which I find it. Here he has spent all his time, with the
exception of a usual winter's visit to New York--a practice recently
discontinued, owing to the increase of his ailments and the projection
of these famous memoirs. His life has finally come to be passed in
comparative solitude. He tells of various distant relatives, as well as
intimate friends of both sexes, who used formerly to be entertained at
his cost; but with each of them, in the course of time, he seems to have
succeeded in quarrelling. Throughout life, evidently, he has had capital
fingers for plucking off parasites. Rich, lonely, and vain, he must have
been fair game for the race of social sycophants and cormorants; and
it's much to the credit of his sharpness and that instinct of
self-defence which nature bestows even on the weak, that he has not been
despoiled and _exploité_. Apparently they have all been bunglers. I
maintain that something is to be done with him still. But one must work
in obedience to certain definite laws. Doctor Jones, his physician,
tells me that in point of fact he has had for the past ten years an
unbroken series of favorites, _protégés_, heirs presumptive; but that