People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.

An Epistle to Posterity: Being Rambling Recollections of Many Years of My Life (ed. 1897)