I have known an old man of
this kind. He insisted on everything being done for his convenience. He
breakfasted very late, and would allow no one to have any food earlier,
saying that it did young people good to wait; that he had always done
work before breakfast, and that there was nothing like an empty stomach
for keeping the head clear. He would not allow the morning paper to be
opened till he came down; and he sate an intolerable time after
breakfast reading extracts from it, often stopping in the middle of a
sentence because some other paragraph had caught his eye. He had a
horrible way of saying, "Guess what has happened to one of our friends;
I will give you ten guesses each"; and he would insist on all kinds of
conjectures being hazarded, while he chuckled over the absurdities
suggested. He took a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries,
and an even franker pleasure in the deaths of his juniors. Then he had
one of his long-suffering daughters to write letters for him, and would
dictate long, ungrammatical sentences to her; but he would permit of no
erasures, and letter after letter would have to be torn up and
re-written. He made all the party walk with him before luncheon, and at
his pace, the same little walk every day. I think he mostly slept in
the afternoon, or read his banking book; his talk was almost wholly
about himself, his virtues, his astonishing health, his perspicacity;
and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with
incredible insolence.
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