this country
in the hope of recouping himself, and to get away from the fast set that
surrounded him.

"I can resist anything but temptation," this warm-hearted Irishman would
say; and that was the keynote of his character.

Though Sir Tom was only sixty years old, he looked seventy. He was much
broken in health by gout and the fast pace of his early manhood. But his
spirit was untouched by misfortune, disease, or hardship. His courage
was as good as when he served as a subaltern of the Guards in the
trenches before Sebastopol, or presented his body as a mark for the
sledge-hammer blows of Tom Sayers, just for diversion. His constitution
must have been superb, for even in his decrepitude he was good to look
upon: five feet ten, fine body, slightly given to rotundity, legs a
little shrunken in the shanks, but giving unmistakable signs of what
they had been ("not lost, but gone before," as he would say of them),
hands and feet aristocratic in form and well cared for, and a fine head
set on broad shoulders. His hair was thin, and he parted it with great
exactness in the middle. His eyes were brown, large, and of exceeding
softness. His nose was straight in spite of many a contusion, and his
whole expression was that of a high-bred gentleman somewhat the worse
for wear. Sir Tom was perfectly groomed when he came forth from his
chamber, which was usually about ten in the morning.

Those of us who had access to his rooms often wondered how he ever got
out of them looking so immaculate, for they were a perfectly impassable
jungle to the stranger. Such a tangle of trunks, hand-bags, rug bundles,
clothes, boots, pajamas, newspapers, scrap-books, B. & S. bottles, could
hardly be found anywhere else in the world. He had a fondness for
newspaper clippings, and had trunks of them, sorted into bundles or
pasted in scrap-books. Old volumes of Bell's _Life_ filled more than one
trunk, and on one occasion when he and I were spending a long evening
together, in celebration of his recent recovery from an attack of gout,
and when he had done more than usual justice to the B. & S. bottles and
less than usual justice to his gout, he showed me the record of a
long-gone year in which this same Bell's _Life_ called him the "first
among the gentlemen riders in the United Kingdom," and proved this
assertion by showing how he had won most of the great steeple-chases in
England and Ireland, riding his own horses. This was the nearest
approach to