How thoroughly he conquered this repugnance to hard work is illustrated by a pathetic incident which happened once when he was engaged upon a bit of writing that interested him, but when he was prevented by rheumatic pains from sitting upright. Prescott then placed his noctograph upon the floor and lay down flat beside it, writing in this attitude for many hours on nine consecutive days rather than give in. He tried some curious devices to penalise himself for laziness. He used to persuade his friends to make bets with him that he would not complete certain portions of writing within a given time. This sort of thing was a good deal of a make-believe, for Prescott cared nothing about money and had plenty of it at his disposal; and when his friends lost, he never permitted them to pay. He did a like thing on a larger scale and in a somewhat different way by giving a bond to his secretary, Mr. English, binding himself to pay a thousand dollars if within one year from September, 1828, Prescott should not have written two hundred and fifty pages of _Ferdinand and Isabella_. This number of pages was specified, because Prescott dreaded his own instability of purpose, and felt that if he should once get so far as two hundred and fifty pages, he would be certain to go on and finish the entire history. Other wagers or bonds with Mr. English were made by Prescott from time to time, all with the purpose of counteracting his own disposition to _far niente_. His settled mode of life also compelled him in some measure to give up the delights of general social intercourse and the convivial pleasures of which he was naturally fond. There were, indeed, times when he did let his work go and enjoyed a return to a freer life, as when in the country at Pepperell he romped and rollicked like a boy; or when in Boston, he was present at some of the jolly little suppers given by his friends and so much liked by him. But on the whole, neither his health nor the arduous researches which he had undertaken allowed him often to break the regularity of his way of living. Nothing, indeed, testifies more strikingly to his naturally buoyant disposition than the fact that years of unvarying routine were unable to make of Prescott a formalist or to render him less charming as a social favourite. In his study he was conspicuously the scholar, the investigator; elsewhere he was the genial companion, full of fun and jest, telling stories and manifesting that gift of personal attractiveness which compelled all within its range to feel wholly and completely at their ease. No writer was ever less given to literary posing. It is, indeed, an extraordinary fact that although Prescott was occupied for ten whole years in preparing his _Ferdinand and Isabella_, during all that time not more than three persons outside of his own family knew that he was writing a book. His friends supposed that his hours of seclusion were occupied in general reading and study.