"I cannot explain, fully at least, why I can visit one club and not the others, the distance from home being practically the same for all. One reason, no doubt, is the pleasure and excitement afforded by meeting men of eminence whose conversation greatly interests me. Another, the rest and reinvigoration resulting from the dinner; and lastly, and perhaps chiefly, that the meetings are so frequent as to admit of my selecting days when the weather, my health, and all other circumstances are favourable." He next describes the mode in which he suffered through the action of others:-- "The disturbances from which I most frequently suffer are noises, especially when unexpected; as, for instance, the sudden opening or closing of a door, the dropping of any article on the floor.... Some protection is afforded me by increasing deafness, whatever the inconvenience of such infirmity. Again, I am painfully sensible to a shake so slight as to be imperceptible to one in ordinary health; such, for instance, as is produced by any one walking across the room save with an almost cat-like tread, or by a touch to my chair so slight as even the mere brush of the servant's clothes against it as he waits at table. Further, I am annoyed by any of those repeated movements of hands or fingers which are habitual to some people, though against this particular annoyance I find some protection in taking a book or newspaper and interposing it as a screen." I may mention here, as an instance of his delicate consideration for the feelings of others, that I had often noticed when I went to see him how he thus screened his eyes. It was not till I read this account of his health that I was in the least aware that it was against my restlessness that he was screening himself. Beneath the balcony that he had built for himself, wherein he hoped, each year as the suns grew warm, to breathe the fresh air, the Metropolitan Asylums Board set up a Small-Pox Hospital. Within a few yards of the old man's only walk ran the road along which, day after day for many a month, passed a sad train of ambulances and a still sadder train of hearses. For the signal benefit that he had conferred not only on England, but on the whole world, he had been hitherto rewarded and honoured by a gratitude that was as strong as it was general, by the free gifts of his countrymen and the vote of Parliament. The University of Oxford had made him a Doctor of Laws, and the Queen had made him a Knight Commander of the Bath. Before many years had passed the City of London was to give him its freedom, and Westminster Abbey a grave. The Asylums Board cared for none of those things. Public benefactors and public honours did not enter into its world. It knew of nothing but ratepayers. But ratepayers, it should have remembered, are after all only men, and men, in these islands at least, are neither ungrateful nor pitiless.