sight, and to shift his admiration from one dear object to another with
a suddenness and rapidity destructive to a well-ordered state
of society.

Though these multiplied transfers of affection occasionally caused some
disappointment among the victims of Mr. Maltboy's inconstancy, it was
wisely ordained that he should be the principal sufferer--that every new
passion should involve him in new difficulties, and subject him to a
degree of mental distress which would have reduced the flesh of any man
not hopelessly predisposed to fatness. As Mr. Matthew Maltboy stood by
the fire, he was not taking the profitable retrospective view of his
life which he should have taken, but was glancing with an expression of
concern at the circumference of a showy vest pattern which cut off the
view of his legs.

The apartment in which the three bachelors were keeping a meditative
silence, was large, square, high, on the first floor back, commanding an
ample prospect of neglected rear yards, and all the strange things that
are usually huddled into those strictly private domains. The furniture
of the room was rich and substantial, but not too good to be used. The
chairs were none of those frail, slippery structures of horsehair and
mahogany so inhospitably cold to the touch; but they were oak, high
backed, deep, long armed, softly but stoutly cushioned with leather, and
yawned to receive nodding tenants and send them comfortably to sleep
amid the fragrant clouds of the after-dinner pipe or cigar.

At one end of the room was Marcus Wilkeson's library, consisting of
about five hundred volumes, of poems, novels, travels by land and sea,
histories, and biographies, which the owner dogmatically held to be all
the books in the world worth reading. The admission of a new book to