And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity -- when his death was reckoned certain , his estate settled , his name dismissed from memory and his wife long , long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood -- he entered the door one evening quietly as from a day 's absence , and became a loving spouse till death . This outline is all that I remember . But the incident , though of the purest originality , unexampled , and probably never to be repeated , is one , I think , which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind . We know , each for himself , that none of us would perpetrate such a folly , yet feel as if some other might . To my own contemplations , at least , it has often recurred , always exciting wonder , but with a sense that the story must be true and a conception of its hero 's character . Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind , time is well spent in thinking of it . If the reader choose , let him do his own meditation ; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield 's vagary , I bid him welcome , trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral , even should we fail to find them , done up neatly and condensed into the final sentence . Thought has always its efficacy and every striking incident its moral . What sort of a man was Wakefield ? We are free to shape out our own idea and call it by his name . He was now in the meridian of life ; his matrimonial affections , never violent , were sobered into a calm , habitual sentiment ; of all husbands , he was likely to be the most constant , because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest wherever it might be placed . He was intellectual , but not actively so ; his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no purpose or had not vigor to attain it ; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words . Imagination , in the proper meaning of the term , made no part of Wakefield 's gifts . With a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart , and a mind never feverish with riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality , who could have anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric deeds ? Had his acquaintances been asked who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be remembered on the morrow , they would have thought of Wakefield . Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated . She , without having analyzed his character , was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind ; of a peculiar sort of vanity , the most uneasy attribute about him ; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets hardly worth revealing ; and , lastly , of what she called a little strangeness sometimes in the good man . This latter quality is indefinable , and perhaps non-existent . Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife . It is the dusk of an October evening .
His equipment is a drab greatcoat , a hat covered with an oil-cloth , top-boots , an umbrella XXXXX one hand and a small portmanteau in the other .
To With after among because from in than that without