He was intensely simple in his tastes. I used to busy myself greatly, Martha-like, about making his room extremely comfortable; but the moment I put anything pretty in it, it used to be put in the passage. He liked large plain deal tables, about six feet long and three or four feet broad, with no table-cloth. He would tie a red bandanna on the leg for a penwiper. He liked hard wooden writing-chairs, and to have a great many of these tables--one for each separate work; a small iron bedstead, with iron wove mattress, no sheets, but plenty of English white soft warm blankets. He would have no night-light; but would never have blinds nor shutters drawn, that he might see daylight as soon as possible, and the last of the twilight. His bookshelves were all of plain deal, and each category upon which he was working, was kept separate. He would not have his books and papers touched, and preferred dust and cobwebs to their being moved. His three private rooms contained only books, swords, pistols, and guns, scientific instruments, a few medicines, and plenty of clothes. He loved his old clothes. He would order rows of greatcoats and ulsters, and then go out in a little thin coat to keep himself hardy. He had a great love for boots, and sometimes had as many as a hundred pairs in the house. I used to implore to be allowed to give his old hats away to the cabmen, and he only laughed immensely at my getting so ashamed of them; but he always had loads of new clothes, and wore the old ones for preference. There was one rather amusing story about a fencing-shoe. He lost one, and he went and asked his bootmaker if he would make him another. He said, "No; he would make him a pair." He took this shoe all over the world, and every bootmaker he saw he asked him to make the odd shoe; but nobody ever would. At last we found out that there is a superstition amongst bootmakers that if they make one boot they die. He tried it for eighteen years and never succeeded, and I have the odd shoe now in remembrance. He never would keep two of anything. If he had two things of a sort he gave one away, and if he became attached to any particular thing he would give it away--another asceticism--nor would he indulge in any perfume except good eau de Cologne.