The last few years of his life were spent at Frankfurt-am-Main, where his was the most perfect instance of a quiet and philosophic life of which I have any knowledge, except Spinoza’s. The fires of his youth and middle age had died down, and the ashes took a long while to become stone-cold. At half-past seven every morning he rose and took a bath, taking particular care to wash his eyes very thoroughly.[25] Then, having ordered his housekeeper strictly to keep to her kitchen, he made himself coffee, and settled down to work for three or four hours; this being in his opinion the utmost that the human brain could stand at severe intellectual labour, in which he was probably right. At noon she came and timidly knocked at his door, whereupon he left his books and began to play upon his flute. At 1 p.m. he went to the Englischer Hof for dinner; and there he ate in silence with a gold coin displayed ostentatiously beside his plate. After this had gone on for some years he explained to a friend that he had kept the coin as a wager to himself that he should present it to the poor-box if anybody should start a discussion about any single subject under the sun but women, wine, and horses. After dinner, with the faithful coin still unused in his pocket, he went home, read light literature for a couple of hours, and at four o’clock went for a brisk walk into the suburbs. His only companion was a poodle-dog, and “Schopenhauer with his dog” has become a legend; the local children used to call it “young Schopenhauer.” After two hours of walking at his utmost speed, summer or winter, he went to the reading-room, and read _The Times_. This literature predisposing him for sleep, he went home, ate a very light supper, got out his long pipe, smoked for an hour, “and so to bed.” And this went on for about ten years, until, one day he noticed that he could not walk quite so fast as usual, and that he was beginning to get breathless when he was going uphill. By this time he had become more egotistical than ever; his chief pleasure was in reading laudatory comments in the newspapers upon Herr Doktor Arthur Schopenhauer _hochwohlgeboren_ and his wonderful philosophy. Gradually praise and public fame began to come to him. A steady stream of people came to see him, among them many women attracted by the thought of the great woman-hater.[26] As his heart began slowly to fail his doctor visited him every day; until one day the philosopher was laid up with a slight attack of pneumonia. Recovering from this, he tried to resume his invariable routine; but on September 20th he had another bad attack. On the morning of the 21st he rose as usual. A few minutes after his housekeeper had left him, his doctor called and found him lying dead on his sofa. The Goddess Luetina, assuming her least terrible appearance, had carried him to the Nirvana where no women could trouble him.