The visitor thus announced was the son of Mr. Vanstone’s oldest associate and nearest neighbor.

Mr. Clare the elder inhabited an unpretending little cottage, situated just outside the shrubbery fence which marked the limit of the Combe-Raven grounds.  Belonging to the younger branch of a family of great antiquity, the one inheritance of importance that he had derived from his ancestors was the possession of a magnificent library, which not only filled all the rooms in his modest little dwelling, but lined the staircases and passages as well.  Mr. Clare’s books represented the one important interest of Mr. Clare’s life.  He had been a widower for many years past, and made no secret of his philosophical resignation to the loss of his wife.  As a father, he regarded his family of three sons in the light of a necessary domestic evil, which perpetually threatened the sanctity of his study and the safety of his books.  When the boys went to school, Mr. Clare said “good-by” to them—­and “thank God” to himself.  As for his small income, and his still smaller domestic establishment, he looked at them both from the same satirically indifferent point of view.  He called himself a pauper with a pedigree.  He abandoned the entire direction of his household to the slatternly old woman who was his only servant, on the condition that she was never to venture near his books, with a duster in her hand, from one year’s end to the other.  His favorite poets were Horace and Pope; his chosen philosophers, Hobbes and Voltaire.  He took his exercise and his fresh air under protest; and always walked the same distance to a yard, on the ugliest high-road in the neighborhood.  He was crooked of back, and quick of temper.  He could digest radishes, and sleep after green tea.  His views of human nature were the views of Diogenes, tempered by Rochefoucauld; his personal habits were slovenly in the last degree; and his favorite boast was that he had outlived all human prejudices.

Such was this singular man, in his more superficial aspects.  What nobler qualities he might possess below the surface, no one had ever discovered.  Mr. Vanstone, it is true, stoutly asserted that “Mr. Clare’s worst side was his outside”—­but in this expression of opinion he stood alone among his neighbors.  The association between these two widely-dissimilar men had lasted for many years, and was almost close enough to be called a friendship.  They had acquired a habit of meeting to smoke together on certain evenings in the week, in the cynic-philosopher’s study, and of there disputing on every imaginable subject—­Mr. Vanstone flourishing the stout cudgels of assertion, and Mr. Clare meeting him with the keen edged-tools of sophistry.  They generally quarreled at night, and met on the neutral ground of the shrubbery to be reconciled together the next morning.  The bond of intercourse thus curiously established between them was strengthened on Mr. Vanstone’s side by a hearty interest in his neighbor’s three sons—­an interest by which those sons benefited all the more importantly, seeing that one of the prejudices which their father had outlived was a prejudice in favor of his own children.