No one knew better than Mr.Maule that the continual bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.
But such as his days were, every minute of them was precious to him.
He possessed the rare merit of making a property of his time and not a burden.

He had so shuffled off his duties that he had now rarely anything to do that was positively disagreeable.

He had been a spendthrift; but his creditors, though perhaps never satisfied, had been quieted.

He did not now deal with reluctant and hard-tasked tenants, but with punctual, though inimical, trustees, who paid to him with charming regularity that portion of his income which he was allowed to spend.