She was not improved by suffering—­she grew daily more callous and spiteful before one’s eyes.  One of her few pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when all the family were out, and tell tales of the gardener for neglecting his work, and of the maid-servants for picking the strawberries.  Yet she had been a shrewd and kindly woman once, and had brought up her children well.  If she had died a dozen years before she would have been truly and tearfully mourned, and now when everyone tacitly felt that she had outstayed her welcome, she lingered on.  She had a bad illness at one time, and when I saw her, for the first time after her recovery, in the family circle, and said something commonplace about being glad to see her so well, “Yes,” she said, looking round with an air of malicious triumph, “they can’t get rid of me just yet—­I know that is what they all feel, but they have to pretend to be glad I am better.”

And then, too, there is another type of age which is hardly less painful, and that is the complacent and sententious old person, intolerably talkative and minutely confidential, who lays down the law about everything, and takes what he calls the privileges of age, a sort of professional patriarch, ruddy and snowy-haired and wide-awake, a terrible specimen of a well-made machine, which goes on working long after heart and brain alike are atrophied.  I have known an old man of this kind.  He insisted on everything being done for his convenience.  He breakfasted very late, and would allow no one to have any food earlier, saying that it did young people good to wait; that he had always done work before breakfast, and that there was nothing like an empty stomach for keeping the head clear.  He would not allow the morning paper to be opened till he came down; and he sate an intolerable time after breakfast reading extracts from it, often stopping in the middle of a sentence because some other paragraph had caught his eye.  He had a horrible way of saying, “Guess what has happened to one of our friends; I will give you ten guesses each”; and he would insist on all kinds of conjectures being hazarded, while he chuckled over the absurdities suggested.  He took a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries, and an even franker pleasure in the deaths of his juniors.  Then he had one of his long-suffering daughters to write letters for him, and would dictate long, ungrammatical sentences to her; but he would permit of no erasures, and letter after letter would have to be torn up and re-written.  He made all the party walk with him before luncheon, and at his pace, the same little walk every day.  I think he mostly slept in the afternoon, or read his banking book; his talk was almost wholly about himself, his virtues, his astonishing health, his perspicacity; and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with incredible insolence.  The clergyman’s life was made a burden to him, and the doctor’s as well.  Though he was