He would take his pipe and walk silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening, for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in its weight as it swung under his hand.

In so far as he could, he supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found.

The drawing-room walls, though mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper--lavender and gilt, a grape-vine pattern--held a few good engravings; the library was reduced to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.
John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books.

He bought them between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe.

Mrs Murchison kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband brought home Chambers's Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new winter overcoat, she declared that it was beyond all endurance.