When the boys went to school, Mr.Clare said "good-by" to them--and "thank God" to himself.

As for his small income, and his still smaller domestic establishment, he looked at them both from the same satirically indifferent point of view.

He called himself a pauper with a pedigree.
He abandoned the entire direction of his household to the slatternly old woman who was his only servant, on the condition that she was never to venture near his books, with a duster in her hand, from one year's end to the other.

His favorite poets were Horace and Pope; his chosen philosophers, Hobbes and Voltaire.

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.