but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me.  All the morning I am pestered.  I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write ‘paid’ against this, and ‘unpaid’ against t’other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind ’some darling thoughts all my own’,—­faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend’s voice—­a snatch of Miss Burrell’s singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face.  The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions (earth’s, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney.  But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres—­the gay science—­who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c.—­what Coleridge said at the lecture last night—­who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it.  These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them.  Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. ——­, or Mr. ——­, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone—­a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion.  O, the pleasure of eating alone!—­eating my dinner alone! let me think of it.  But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange—­for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I have not wine.  Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters—­(God bless ’em!  I love some of ’em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away.  Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bed-time.  Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go!  The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows.