By this time Masterman was in his seventy-third year; he had long

complained of the effects of age, had long since retired from business,

and now lived in absolute seclusion under the roof of his son Michael,

the well-known solicitor. Joseph, on the other hand, was still up and

about, and still presented but a semi-venerable figure on the streets

in which he loved to wander. This was the more to be deplored because

Masterman had led (even to the least particular) a model British life.

Industry, regularity, respectability, and a preference for the four per

cents are understood to be the very foundations of a green old age. All

these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at

seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most

excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness

and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied

of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for

general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his

manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless,

perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently

accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the

acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers

gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many

years had passed over his head before he would have travelled thirty

miles to address an infant school. He was no student; his reading was

confined to elementary textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even

fly as high as cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume. His

lectures were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they

The Wrong Box