For more than fifteen years, my father lived in his retirement at Furze Hill much as I have shown; doing everything that was worth doing at all with a zest and a will and, among the daily tasks, invariably doing the most disagreeable thing first.

Over the once quiet and pretty neighbourhood, little villas with big names had multiplied by the hundred; and genteel mansions, each with a smaller garden and a more imposing façade than its predecessor, engulfed field after field. The only old farm near us, to my father's double disgust, was turned by capital into a hideous “park,” all trim roads and iron hurdles; so by degrees his sense of solitude and isolation grew upon him, and his walks became more and more perfunctory till he set himself a certain beat with a gate-post at the end, which he always made it a point of conscience to touch before hastening homewards.

His sketching expeditions were long since over, and the dear Devonshire combes he would see no more. But, as his bodily strength decreased, his mind seemed to grow more vigorous, as was shown by the pithiness of his correspondence, the alacrity with which he entered into any topic which touched upon the deeper veins of thought, by his industry, and by the unabated fertility of his powers of design. He worked, he asserted, with more energy than at thirty; and in 1878 he was able to say ≔ “… I do daily, before dinner, about four hours' work with my whole mind bent upon it, but cannot go on longer at a stretch. […]”