He took his exercise and his fresh
air under protest; and always walked the same distance to a yard, on the
ugliest high-road in the neighborhood. He was crooked of back, and quick
of temper. He could digest radishes, and sleep after green tea.
His views of human nature were the views of Diogenes, tempered by
Rochefoucauld; his personal habits were slovenly in the last degree; and
his favorite boast was that he had outlived all human prejudices.

Such was this singular man, in his more superficial aspects. What
nobler qualities he might possess below the surface, no one had ever
discovered. Mr. Vanstone, it is true, stoutly asserted that "Mr. Clare's
worst side was his outside"--but in this expression of opinion he
stood alone among his neighbors. The association between these two
widely-dissimilar men had lasted for many years, and was almost close
enough to be called a friendship. They had acquired a habit of
meeting to smoke together on certain evenings in the week, in the
cynic-philosopher's study, and of there disputing on every imaginable
subject--Mr. Vanstone flourishing the stout cudgels of assertion, and
Mr. Clare meeting him with the keen edged-tools of sophistry. They
generally quarreled at night, and met on the neutral ground of the
shrubbery to be reconciled together the next morning. The bond of
intercourse thus curiously established between them was strengthened
on Mr. Vanstone's side by a hearty interest in his neighbor's
three sons--an interest by which those sons benefited all the more
importantly, seeing that one of the prejudices which their father had
outlived was a prejudice in favor of his own children.

"I look at those boys," the philosopher was accustomed to say, "with
a perfectly impartial eye; I dismiss the unimportant accident of their
birth from all consideration; and I find them below the average in every
respect. The only excuse which a poor gentleman has for presuming to
exist in the nineteenth century, is the excuse of extraordinary ability.
My boys have been addle-headed from infancy. If I had any capital to
give them, I should make Frank a butcher, Cecil a baker, and Arthur
a grocer--those being the only human vocations I know of which are
certain to be always in request. As it is, I have no money to help them
with; and they have no brains to help themselves. They appear to me
to be three human superfluities in dirty jackets and noisy boots; and,
unless they clear themselves off the