f
some dandy old Brown whom he had valeted[18] in the middle of last
century, which habiliment Master Tom looked upon with considerable
respect, not to say fear; and indeed his whole feeling toward Noah was
strongly tainted with awe; and when the old gentleman was gathered to
his fathers, Tom's lamentation over him was not unaccompanied by a
certain joy at having seen the last of the wig: "Poor old Noah, dead
and gone," said he, "Tom Brown so sorry! Put him in the coffin, wig
and all!"

[15] #Pillion#: a seat, for a woman, attached to the hinder
part of a saddle.

[16] #Fetish#: an idol.

[17] #Full-bottomed wig#: this was a large wig worn by all men
of fashion in the last century.

[18] #Valeted#: served; (from _valet_, a gentleman's private
servant).

TOM BROWN'S ABETTORS--BENJY.

But old Benjy was young master's real delight and refuge. He was a
youth by the side of Noah, scarce seventy years old. A cheery,
humorous, kind-hearted old man, full of sixty years of Vale gossip,
and of all sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but above all for
children. It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extricated
his first stickleback[19] out of "Pebbly Brook," the little stream
which ran through the village. The first stickleback was a splendid
fellow, with fabulous red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small
basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day.
Within a month from the taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had
carried off our hero to the canal, in defiance of Charity; and between
them, after a whole afternoon's pop-joying,[20] they had caught three
or four coarse fish and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half
ounces each, which Tom bore home in rapture to his mother as a
precious gift, and which she received like a true mother with equal
rapture, instructing the cook nevertheless, in a private interview,
not to prepare the same for the squire's dinner. Charity had appealed
against old Benjy in the meantime, representing the dangers of the
canal banks; but Mrs. Brown, seeing the boy's inaptitude for female
guidance, had decided in Benjy's favor, and from thenceforth the old
man was Tom's dry nurse. And as they sat by the canal watching their
little green and white float,[21] Benjy would instruct him in the
doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of
the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and