needed to be, and popular among many friends.
He was suitably married, and had healthy and pretty children. But,
like some fair-looking houses or fair-looking ships, he took the Dry
Rot. The first strong external revelation of the Dry Rot in men, is a
tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without
intelligible reason; to be going anywhere when met; to be about many
places rather than at any; to do nothing tangible, but to have an
intention of performing a variety of intangible duties to-morrow or
the day after. When this manifestation of the disease is observed, the
observer will usually connect it with a vague impression once formed
or received, that the patient was living a little too hard. He will
scarcely have had leisure to turn it over in his mind and form the
terrible suspicion "Dry Rot," when he will notice a change for the
worse in the patient's appearance: a certain slovenliness and
deterioration, which is not poverty, nor dirt, nor intoxication, nor
ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To this, succeeds a smell as of strong
waters, in the morning; to that, a looseness respecting money; to
that, a stronger smell as of strong waters, at all times; to that, a
looseness respecting everything; to that, a trembling of the limbs,
somnolency, misery, and crumbling to pieces. As it is in wood, so it
is in men. Dry Rot advances at a compound usury quite incalculable. A
plank is found infected with it, and the whole structure is devoted.
Thus it had been with the unhappy Horace Kinch, lately buried by a
small subscription. Those who knew him had not nigh done saying, "So
well off, so comfortably established, with such hope before him--and
yet, it is feared, with a slight touch of Dry Rot!" when lo! the man
was all Dry Rot and dust.

From the dead wall associated on those houseless nights with this too
common story, I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hospital; partly,
because it lay on my road round to Westminster; partly, because I had
a night fancy in my head which could be best pursued within sight of
its walls and dome. And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the
insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us
outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of
those inside it, every night of our lives? Are we not nightly
persuaded, as they daily are, that we associate preposterously with
kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all
sorts? Do we