ence from home, he could not refrain from
expressing his sense of the great services of this most distinguished
officer, who had left his regiment in a state of the highest discipline
and efficiency.

This kind Colonel had also to take leave of a score, at least, of adopted
children to whom he chose to stand in the light of a father. He was
forever whirling away in post-chaises to this school and that, to see
Jack Brown's boys, of the Cavalry; or Mrs. Smith's girls, of the Civil
Service; or poor Tom Hick's orphan, who had nobody to look after him now
that the cholera had carried off Tom and his wife, too. On board the ship
in which he returned from Calcutta were a dozen of little children, some
of whom he actually escorted to their friends before he visited his own,
though his heart was longing for his boy at Grey Friars. The children at
the schools seen, and largely rewarded out of his bounty (his loose white
trousers had great pockets, always heavy with gold and silver, which he
jingled when he was not pulling his moustaches, and to see the way in
which he tipped children made one almost long to be a boy again) and when
he had visited Miss Pinkerton's establishment, or Doctor Ramshorn's
adjoining academy at Chiswick, and seen little Tom Davis or little Fanny
Holmes, the honest fellow would come home and write off straightway a
long letter to Tom's or Fanny's parents, far away in the country, whose
hearts he made happy by his accounts of their children, as he had
delighted the children themselves by his affection and bounty. All the
apple and orange-women (especially such as had babies as well as
lollipops at their stalls), all the street-sweepers on the road between
Nerot's and the Oriental, knew him, and were his pensioners. His brothers
in Threadneedle Street cast up their eyes at the cheques which he drew.

The Colonel had written to his brothers from Portsmouth, announcing his
arrival, and three words to Clive, conveying the same intelligence. The
letter was served to the boy along with one bowl of tea and one buttered
roll, of eighty such which were distributed to fourscore other boys,
boarders of the same house with our young friend. How the lad's face must
have flushed and his eyes brightened when he read the news! When the
master of the house, the Reverend Mister Popkinson, came into the
lodging-room, with a good-natured face, and said, "Newcome, you're
wanted," he knew who had come. He did not heed that notor