But this is an excursus:  I would that my hand were wielding a stout horsewhip rather than a pen!  Let me return to the point of deviation, and say that a human being, if he be true-hearted, by living in a family, insensibly and constantly is gently turned from his own stiff track; and goes through life sinuously, so to speak.  But the lonely man settles into his own little ways.  He is like the man who walks through the desert without a soul to elbow him for miles.  He fixes his own hours; he sits in his own corner, in his peculiar chair; he arranges the lamp where it best suits himself that it should stand; he reads his newspaper when he pleases, for no one else wants to see it; he orders from the club the books that suit his own taste.  And all this quite fitly:  like the Duke of Argyle’s attacks upon Lord Derby, these things please himself, and do harm to nobody.  It is not selfishness not to consult the wishes of other people, if there be no other people whose wishes you can consult.  And, though with great suffering to himself, I believe that many a kind-hearted, precise old bachelor, stiffened into his own ways through thirty solitary years would yet make an effort to give them up, if he fancied that to yield a little from them was needful to the comfort of others.  He would give up the corner by the fire in which he Las sat through the life of a generation:  he would resign to another the peg on which his hat has hung through that long time.  Still, all this would cost a painful effort; and one need hardly repeat the common-place, that if people intend ever to get married, it is expedient that they should do so before they have settled too rigidly into their own ways.

It is a very touching thing, I think, to turn over the repositories of a lonely man after he is dead.  You come upon so many indications of all his little ways and arrangements.  In the case of men who have been the heads of large families, this work is done by those who have been most nearly connected with them, and who knew their ways before; and such men, trained hourly to yield their own wishes in things small and great, have comparatively few of those little peculiar ways in which so much of their individuality seems to make its touching appeal to us after they are gone.  But lonely men not merely have very many little arrangements of their own, but have a particular reserve in exhibiting these:  there is a strong sensitiveness about them:  you know how they would have shrunk in life from allowing any one to turn over their papers, or even to look into the arrangements of their wardrobe and their linen-press.  I remember once, after the sudden death of a reserved old gentleman, being one of two or three who went over all his repositories.  The other people who did so with me were hard-headed lawyers, and did not seem to mind much; but I remember that it appeared to me a most touching sight we saw.  All the little ways into which he had grown in forty lonely years;