"Mr. Armsworth? I beg your pardon, sir; but what brings you here? Are you come, sir, to use the rich successful man's right, and lecture me in my misery?"

"'Pon my word, sir, you must have forgotten old Mark Armsworth, indeed, if you fancy him capable of any such dirt. No, sir, I came to pay my respects to you, sir, hoping that you'd come up and take a family dinner. I could do no less," ran on the banker, seeing that Elsley was preparing a peevish answer, "considering the honour that, I hear, you have been to your native town. A very distinguished person, our friend Tom tells me; and we ought to be proud of you, and behave to you as you deserve, for I am sure we don't send too many clever fellows out of Whitbury."

"Would that you had never sent me!" said Elsley in his bitter way.

"Ah, sir, that's matter of opinion! You would never have been heard of down here, never have had justice done you, I mean; for heard of you have been. There's my daughter has read your poems again and again— always quoting them; and very pretty they sound too. Poetry is not in my line, of course; still, it's a credit to a man to do anything well, if he has the gift; and she tells me that you have it, and plenty of it. And though she's no fine lady, thank Heaven, I'll back her for good sense against any woman. Come up, sir, and judge for yourself if I don't speak the truth; she will be delighted to meet you, and bade me say so."

By this time good Mark had talked himself out of breath; and Elsley flushing up, as of old, at a little praise, began to stammer an excuse. "His nerves were so weak, and his spirits so broken with late troubles."

"My dear sir, that's the very reason I want you to come. A bottle of port will cure the nerves, and a pleasant chat the spirits. Nothing like forgetting all for a little time; and then to it again with a fresh lease of strength, and beat it at last like a man."

"Too late, my dear sir; I must pay the penalty of my own folly," said Elsley, really won by the man's cordiality.

"Never too late, sir, while there's life left in us. And," he went on in a gentler tone, "if we all were to pay for our own follies, or lie down and die when we saw them coming full cry at our heels, where would any one of us be by now? I have been a fool in my time, young gentleman, more than once or twice; and that too when I was old enough to be your father: and down I went, and deserved what I got: but my rule always was—Fight fair; fall soft; know when you've got enough; and don't cry out when you've got it: but just go home; train again; and say—better luck next fight." And so old Mark's sermon ended (as most of them did) in somewhat Socratic allegory, savouring rather of the market than of the study; but Elsley understood him, and looked up with a smile.

"You too are somewhat of a poet in your way, I see, sir!"

"I never thought to live to hear that, sir. I can't doubt now that you are cleverer than your neighbours, for you have found out something which they never did. But you will come?—for that's my business."

Elsley looked inquiringly at Tom; he had learnt now to consult his eye, and lean on him like a child. Tom looked a stout yes, and Elsley said languidly,—

"You have given me so much new and good advice in a few minutes, sir, that I must really do myself the pleasure of coming and hearing more."

"Well done, our side!" cried old Mark. "Dinner at half-past five. No London late hours here, sir. Miss Armsworth will be out of her mind when she hears you're coming."

And off he went.

"Do you think he'll come up to the scratch, Tom?"

"I am very much afraid his courage will fail him. I will see him again, and bring him up with me: but now, my dear Mr. Armsworth, do remember one thing; that if you go on with him at your usual rate of hospitality, the man will as surely be drunk, as his nerves and brain are all but ruined; and if he is so, he will most probably destroy himself to-morrow morning."

"Destroy himself?"

"He will. The shame of making a fool of himself just now before you will be more than he could bear. So be stingy for once. He will not wish for it unless you press him; but if he talks (and he will talk after the first half-hour), he will forget himself, and half a bottle will make him mad; and then I won't answer for the consequences."

"Good gracious! why, these poets want as tender handling as a bag of gunpowder over the fire."

"You speak like a book there in your turn." And Tom went home to his father.

He returned in due time. A new difficulty had arisen. Elsley, under the excitement of expectation, had gone out and deigned to buy laudanum—so will an unhealthy craving degrade a man!—of old Bolus himself, who luckily did not recognise him. He had taken his fullest dose, and was now unable to go anywhere or do anything. Tom did not disturb him: but went away, sorely perplexed, and very much minded to tell a white lie to Armsworth, in whose eyes this would be an offence—not unpardonable, for nothing with him was unpardonable, save lying or cruelty—but very grievous. If a man had drunk too much wine in his house, he would have simply kept his eye on him afterwards, as a fool who did not know when he had his "quotum;" but laudanum drinking,—involving, too, the breaking of an engagement, which, well managed, might have been of immense use to Elsley,—was a very different matter. So Tom knew not what to say or do; and not knowing, determined to wait on Providence, smartened himself as best he could, went up to the great house, and found Miss Mary.

"I'll tell her. She will manage it somehow, if she is a woman; much more if she is an angel, as my father says."

Mary looked very much shocked and grieved; answered hardly a word; but said at last, "Come in, while I go and see my father." He came into the smart drawing-room, which he could see was seldom used; for Mary lived in her own room, her father in his counting-house, or in his "den." In ten minutes she came down. Tom thought she had been crying.

"I have settled it. Poor unhappy man! We will talk of something more pleasant. Tell me about your shipwreck, and that place,—Aberalva, is it not? What a pretty name!"

Tom told her, wondering then, and wondering long afterwards, how she had "settled it" with her father. She chatted on artlessly enough, till the old man came in, and to dinner, in capital humour, without saying one word of Elsley.

"How has the old lion been tamed?" thought Tom. "The two greatest affronts you could offer him in old times were, to break an engagement, and to despise his good cheer." He did not know what the quiet oil on the waters of such a spirit as Mary's can effect.

The evening passed pleasantly enough till nine, in chatting over old times, and listening to the history of every extraordinary trout and fox which had been killed within twenty miles, when the footboy entered with a somewhat scared face.

"Please, sir, is Mr. Vavasour here?"

"Here? Who wants him?"

"Mrs. Brown, sir, in Hemmelford Street. Says he lodges with her, and has been to seek for him at Dr. Thurnall's."

"I think you had better go, Mr. Thurnall," said Mary, quietly.

"Indeed you had, boy. Bother poets, and the day they first began to breed in Whitbury! Such an evening spoilt! Have a cup of coffee? No? then a glass of sherry?"

Out went Tom. Mrs. Brown had been up, and seen him seemingly sleeping; then had heard him run downstairs hurriedly. He passed her in the passage, looking very wild. "Seemed, sir, just like my nevy's wife's brother, Will Ford, before he made away with hes'self."

Tom goes off post haste, revolving many things in a crafty heart. Then he steers for Bolus's shop. Bolus is at "The Angler's Arms;" but his assistant is in.

"Did a gentleman call here just now, in a long cloak, with a felt wide-awake?"

"Yes." And the assistant looks confused enough for Tom to rejoin,—

"And you sold him laudanum?"

"Why—ah—"

"And you had sold him laudanum already this afternoon, you young rascal? How dare you, twice in six hours? I'll hold you responsible for the man's life!"

"You dare call me a rascal?" blusters the youth, terror-stricken at finding how much Tom knows.

"I am a member of the College of Surgeons," says Tom, recovering his coolness, "and have just been dining with Mr. Armsworth. I suppose you know him?"

The assistant shook in his shoes at the name of that terrible justice of the peace and of the war also; and meekly and contritely he replied,—

"Oh sir, what shall I do?"

"You're in a very neat scrape; you could not have feathered your nest better," says Tom, quietly filling his pipe, and thinking. "As you behave now, I will get you out of it, or leave you to—you know what, as well as I. Get your hat."

He went out, and the youth followed trembling, while Tom formed his plans in his mind.

"The wild beast goes home to his lair to die, and so may he; for I fear it's life and death now. I'll try the house where he was born. Somewhere in Water Lane it is I know."

And toward Water Lane he hurried. It was a low-lying offshoot of the town, leading along the water meadows, with a straggling row of houses on each side, the perennial haunts of fever and ague. Before them, on each side the road, and fringed with pollard willows and tall poplars, ran a tiny branch of the Whit, to feed some mill below; and spread out, meanwhile, into ponds and mires full of offal and duckweed and rank floating grass. A thick mist hung knee-deep over them, and over the gardens right and left; and as Tom came down on the lane from the main street above, he could see the mist spreading across the water-meadows and reflecting the moon-beams like a lake; and as he walked into it, he felt as if he were walking down a well. And he hurried down the lane, looking out anxiously ahead for the long cloak.

At last he came to a better sort of house. That might be it. He would take the chance. There was a man of the middle class, and two or three women, standing at the gate. He went up—

"Pray, sir, did a medical man named Briggs ever live here?"

"What do you want to know for?"

"Why"—Tom thought matters were too serious for delicacy—"I am looking for a gentleman, and thought he might have come here."

"And so he did, if you mean one in a queer hat and a cloak."

"How long since?"

"Why, he came up our garden an hour or more ago; walked right into the parlour without with your leave, or by your leave, and stared at us all round like one out of his mind; and so away, as soon as ever I asked him what he was at—"

"Which way?"

"To the river, I expect: I ran out, and saw him go down the lane, but I was not going far by night alone with any such strange customers."

"Lend me a lanthorn then, for Heaven's sake!"

The lanthorn is lent, and Tom starts again down the lane.

Now to search. At the end of the lane is a cross road parallel to the river. A broad still ditch lies beyond it, with a little bridge across, where one gets minnows for bait: then a broad water-meadow; then silver Whit.

The bridge-gate is open. Tom hurries across the road to it. The lanthorn shows him fresh footmarks going into the meadow. Forward!

Up and down in that meadow for an hour or more did Tom and the trembling youth beat like a brace of pointer dogs, stumbling into gripes, and over sleeping cows; and more than once stopping short just in time, as they were walking into some broad and deep feeder.

Almost in despair, and after having searched down the river bank for full two hundred yards, Tom was on the point of returning, when his eye rested on a part of the stream where the mist lay higher than usual, and let the reflection of the moonlight off the water reach his eye; and in the moonlight ripples, close to the farther bank of the river—what was that black lump?

Tom knew the spot well; the river there is very broad, and very shallow, flowing round low islands of gravel and turf. It was very low just now too, as it generally is in October: there could not be four inches of water where the black lump lay, but on the side nearest him the water was full knee deep.

The thing, whatever it was, was forty yards from him; and it was a cold night for wading. It might be a hassock of rushes; a tuft of the great water-dock; a dead dog; one of the "hangs" with which the club-water was studded, torn up and stranded: but yet, to Tom, it had not a canny look.

"As usual! Here am I getting wet, dirty, and miserable, about matters which are not the slightest concern of mine! I believe I shall end by getting hanged or shot in somebody else's place, with this confounded spirit of meddling. Yah! how cold the water is!"

For in he went, the grumbling honest dog; stepped across to the black lump; and lifted it up hastily enough,—for it was Elsley Vavasour.

Drowned?

No. But wet through, and senseless from mingled cold and laudanum.

Whether he had meant to drown himself, and lighting on the shallow, had stumbled on till he fell exhausted: or whether he had merely blundered into the stream, careless whither he went, Tom knew not, and never knew; for Elsley himself could not recollect.

Tom took him in his arms, carried him ashore and up through the water meadow; borrowed a blanket and a wheelbarrow at the nearest cottage; wrapped him up; and made the offending surgeon's assistant wheel him to his lodgings.

He sat with him there an hour; and then entered Mark's house again with his usual composed face, to find Mark and Mary sitting up in great anxiety.

"Mr. Armsworth, does the telegraph work at this time of night?"

"I'll make it, if it is wanted. But what's the matter?"

"You will indeed?"

"'Gad, I'll go myself and kick up the station-master. What's the matter?"

"That if poor Mrs. Vavasour wishes to see her husband alive, she must be here in four-and-twenty hours. I'll tell you all presently—"

"Mary, my coat and comforter!" cries Mark, jumping up.

"And, Mary, a pen and ink to write the message," says Tom.

"Oh! cannot I be of any use?" says Mary.

"No, you angel."

"You must not call me an angel, Mr. Thurnall. After all, what can I do which you have not done already?"

Tom started. Grace had once used to him the very same words. By the by, what was it in the two women which made them so like? Certainly, neither face nor fortune. Something in the tones of their voices.

"Ah! if Grace had Mary's fortune, or Mary Grace's face!" thought Tom, as he hurried back to Elsley, and Mark rushed down to the station.

Elsley was conscious when he returned, and only too conscious. All night he screamed in agonies of rheumatic fever; by the next afternoon he was failing fast; his heart was affected; and Tom knew that he might die any hour.

The evening train brings two ladies, Valencia and Lucia. At the risk of her life, the poor faithful wife has come.

A gentleman's carriage is waiting for them, though they have ordered none; and as they go through the station-room, a plain little well-dressed body comes humbly up to them—

"Are either of these ladies Mrs. Vavasour?"

"Yes! I!—I!—is he alive?" gasps Lucia.

"Alive, and better! and expecting you—"

"Better?—expecting me?" almost shrieks she, as Valencia and Mary (for it is she) help her to the carriage. Mary puts them in, and turns away.

"Are you not coming too?" asks Valencia, who is puzzled.

"No, thank you, madam; I am going to take a walk. John, you know where to drive these ladies."

Little Mary does not think it necessary to say that she, with her father's carriage, has been down to two other afternoon trains, upon the chance of finding them.

But why is not Frank Headley with them, when he is needed most? And why are Valencia's eyes more red with weeping than even her sister's sorrow need have made them?

Because Frank Headley is rolling away in a French railway, on his road to Marseilles, and to what Heaven shall find for him to do.

Yes, he is gone Eastward Ho among the many; will he come Westward Ho again, among the few?

They are at the door of Elsley's lodgings now. Tom Thurnall meets them there, and bows them upstairs silently. Lucia is so weak that she has to cling to the banister a moment; and then, with a strong shudder, the spirit conquers the flesh, and she hurries up before them both.

It is a small low room—Valencia had expected that: but she had expected, too, confusion and wretchedness: for a note from Major Campbell, ere he started, had told her of the condition in which Elsley had been found. Instead, she finds neatness—even gaiety; fresh damask linen, comfortable furniture, a vase of hothouse flowers, while the air was full of cool perfumes. No one is likely to tell her that Mary has furnished all at Tom's hint—"We must smarten up the place, for the poor wife's sake. It will take something off the shock; and I want to avoid shocks for her."

So Tom had worked with his own hands that morning; arranging the room as carefully as any woman, with that true doctor's forethought and consideration, which often issues in the loftiest, because the most unconscious, benevolence.

He paused at the door—

"Will you go in?" whispered he to Valencia, in a tone which meant—"you had better not."

"Not yet—I daresay he is too weak."

Lucia darted in, and Tom shut the door behind her, and waited at the stair-head. "Better," thought he, "to let the two poor creatures settle their own concerns. It must end soon, in any case."

Lucia rushed to the bed-side, drew back the curtains—

"Tom!" moaned Elsley.

"Not Tom!—Lucia!"

"Lucia?—Lucia St. Just!" answered he, in a low abstracted voice, as if trying to recollect.

"Lucia Vavasour!—your Lucia!"

Elsley slowly raised himself upon his elbow, and looked into her face with a sad inquiring gaze.

"Elsley—darling Elsley!—don't you know me?"

"Yes, very well indeed; better than you know me. I am not Vavasour at all. My name is Briggs—John Briggs, the apothecary's son, come home to Whitbury to die."

She did not hear, or did not care for those last words.

"Elsley! I am your wife!—your own wife!—who never loved any one but you—never, never, never!"

"Yes, my wife, at least!—Curse them, that they cannot deny!" said he, in the same abstracted voice.

"Oh God! is he mad?" thought she. "Elsley, speak to me!—I am your Lucia—your love—"

And she tore off her bonnet, and threw herself beside him on the bed, and clasped him in her arms, murmuring,—"Your wife! who never loved any one but you!"

Slowly his frozen heart and frozen brain melted beneath the warmth of her great love: but he did not speak: only he passed his weak arm round her neck; and she felt that his cheek was wet with tears, while she murmured on, like a cooing dove, the same sweet words again—

"Call me your love once more, and I shall know that all is past."

"Then call me no more Elsley, love!" whispered he. "Call me John Briggs, and let us have done with shams for ever."

"No; you are my Elsley—my Vavasour! and I am your wife once more!" and the poor thing fondled his head as it lay upon the pillow. "My own Elsley, to whom I gave myself, body and soul; for whom I would die now, —oh, such a death!—any death!"

"How could I doubt you?—fool that I was!"

"No, it was all my fault. It was all my odious temper! But we will be happy now, will we not?"

Elsley smiled sadly, and began babbling—Yes, they would take a farm, and he would plough, and sow, and be of some use before he died; "But promise me one thing!" cried he, with sudden strength.

"What?"

"That you will go home and burn all the poetry—all the manuscripts, and never let the children write a verse—a verse—when I am dead?" And his head sank back, and his jaw dropped.

"He is dead!" cried the poor impulsive creature, with a shriek which brought in Tom and Valencia.

"He is not dead, madam: but you must be very gentle with him, if we are to—"

Tom saw that there was little hope.

"I will do anything,—only save him!—save him! Mr. Thurnall, till I have atoned for all."

"You have little enough to atone for, madam," said Tom, as he busied himself about the sufferer. He saw that all would soon be over, and would have had Mrs. Vavasour withdraw: but she was so really good a nurse as long as she could control herself, that he could hardly spare her.

So they sat together by the sick-bed side, as the short hours passed into the long, and the long hours into the short again, and the October dawn began to shine through the shutterless window.

A weary eventless night it was, a night as of many years, as worse and worse grew the weak frame; and Tom looked alternately at the heaving chest, and shortening breath, and rattling throat, and then at the pale still face of the lady.

"Better she should sit by (thought he), and watch him till she is tired out. It will come on her the more gently, after all. He will die at sunrise, as so many die."

At last be began gently feeling for Elsley's pulse.

Her eye caught his movement, and she half sprang up; but at a gesture from him she sank quietly on her knees, holding her husband's hand in her own.

Elsley turned toward her once, ere the film of death had fallen, and looked her full in the face, with his beautiful eyes full of love. Then the eyes paled and faded; but still they sought for her painfully long after she had buried her head in the coverlet, unable to bear the sight.

And so vanished away Elsley Vavasour, poet and genius, into his own place.

"Let us pray," said a deep voice from behind the curtain: it was Mark Armsworth's. He had come over with the first dawn, to bring the ladies food; had slipped upstairs to ask what news, found the door open, and entered in time to see the last gasp.

Lucia kept her head still buried: and Tom, for the first time for many a year, knelt, as the old banker commended to God the soul of our dear brother just departing this life. Then Mark glided quietly downstairs, and Valencia, rising, tried to lead Mrs. Vavasour away.

But then broke out in all its wild passion the Irish temperament. Let us pass it over; why try to earn a little credit by depicting the agony and the weakness of a sister?

At last Thurnall got her downstairs. Mark was there still, having sent off for his carriage. He quietly put her arm through his, led her off, worn out and unresisting, drove her home, delivered her and Valencia into Mary's keeping, and then asked Tom to stay and sit with him.

"I hope I've no very bad conscience, boy; but Mary's busy with the poor young thing, mere child she is, too, to go through such a night; and, somehow, I don't like to be left alone after such a sight as that!"

* * * * *

"Tom!" said Mark, as they sat smoking in silence, after breakfast, in the study. "Tom!"

"Yes, sir!"

"That was an awful death-bed, Tom!"

Tom was silent.

"I don't mean that he died hard, as we say; but so young, Tom. And I suppose poets' souls are worth something, like other people's—perhaps more. I can't understand 'em; but my Mary seems to, and people, like her, who think a poet the finest thing in the world. I laugh at it all when I am jolly, and call it sentiment and cant: but I believe that they are nearer heaven than I am: though I think they don't quite know where heaven is, nor where" (with a wicked wink, in spite of the sadness of his tone)—"where they themselves are either."

"I'll tell you, sir. I have seen men enough die—we doctors are hardened to it: but I have seen unprofessional deaths—men we didn't kill ourselves; I have seen men drowned, shot, hanged, run over, and worse deaths than that, sir, too;—and, somehow, I never felt any death like that man's. Granted, he began by trying to set the world right, when he hadn't yet set himself right; but wasn't it some credit to see that the world was wrong?"

"I don't know that. The world's a very good world."

"To you and me; but there are men who have higher notions than I of what this world ought to be; and, for aught I know, they are right. That Aberalva curate, Headley, had; and so had Briggs, in his own way. I thought him once only a poor discontented devil, who quarrelled with his bread and butter because he hadn't teeth to eat it with: but there was more in the fellow, coxcomb as he was. 'Tisn't often that I let that croaking old bogy, Madam might have been, trouble me; but I cannot help thinking that if, fifteen years ago, I had listened to his vapourings more, and bullied him about them less, he might have been here still."

"You wouldn't have been then. Well for you that you didn't catch his fever."

"And write verses too? Don't make me laugh, sir, on such a day as this; I always comfort myself with—'it's no business of mine:' but, somehow, I can't do so just now." And Tom sat silent, more softened than he had been for years.

"Let's talk of something else," said Mark at last. "You had the cholera very bad down there, I hear?"

"Oh, sharp, but short," said Tom, who disliked any subject which brought Grace to his mind.

"Any on my lord's estate with the queer name?"

"Not a case. We stopped the devil out there, thanks to his lordship."

"So did we here. We were very near in for it, though, I fancy.—At least, I chose to fancy so—thought it a good opportunity to clean Whitbury once for all."

"It's just like you. Well?"

"Well, I offered the Town-council to drain the whole town at my own expense, if they'd let me have the sewage. And that only made things worse; for as soon as the beggars found out the sewage was worth anything, they were down on me, as if I wanted to do them—I, Mark Armsworth!—and would sooner let half the town rot with an epidemic, than have reason to fancy I'd made any money out of them. So a pretty fight I had, for half-a-dozen meetings, till I called in my lord; and, sir, he came down by the next express, like a trump, all the way from town, and gave them such a piece of his mind—was going to have the Board of Health down, and turn on the Government tap, commissioners and all, and cost 'em hundreds: till the fellows shook in their shoes;—and so I conquered, and here we are, as clean as a nut,—and a fig for the cholera!—except down in Water-lane, which I don't know what to do with; for if tradesmen will run up houses on spec in a water-meadow, who can stop them? There ought to be a law for it, say I; but I say a good many things in the twelve months that nobody minds. But, my dear boy, if one man in a town has pluck and money, he may do it. It'll cost him a few: I've had to pay the main part myself, after all: but I suppose God will make it up to a man somehow. That's old Mark's faith, at least. Now I want to talk to you about yourself. My lord comes into town to-day, and you must see him."

"Why, then? He can't help me with the Bashi-bazouks, can he?"

"Bashi-fiddles! I say, Tom, the more I think over it, the more it won't do. It's throwing yourself away. They say that Turkish contingent is getting on terribly ill."

"More need of me to make them well."

"Hang it—I mean—hasn't justice done it, and so on. The papers are full of it."

"Well," quoth Tom, "and why should it?"

"Why, man alive, if England spends all this money on the men, she ought to do her duty by them."

"I don't see that. As Pecksniff says, 'if England expects every man to do his duty, she's very sanguine, and will be much disappointed.' They don't intend to do their duty by her, any more than I do; so why should she do her duty by them?"

"Don't intend to do your duty?"

"I'm going out because England's money is necessary to me; and England hires me because my skill is necessary to her. I didn't think of duty when I settled to go, and why should she? I'll get all out of her I can in the way of pay and practice, and she may get all she can out of me in the way of work. As for being ill-used, I never expect to be anything else in this life. I'm sure I don't care; and I'm sure she don't; so live and let live; talk plain truth, and leave Bunkum for right honourables who keep their places thereby. Give me another weed."

"Queer old philosopher you are; but go you shan't!"

"Go I will, sir; don't stop me. I've my reasons, and they're good ones enough."

The conversation was interrupted by the servant;—Lord Minchampstead was waiting at Mr. Armsworth's office.

"Early bird, his lordship, and gets the worm accordingly," says Mark, as he hurries off to attend on his ideal hero. "You come over to the shop in half-an-hour, mind."

"But why?"

"Confound you, sir! you talk of having your reasons: I have mine!"

Mark looked quite cross; so Tom gave way, and went in due time to the bank.

Standing with his back to the fire in Mark's inner room, he saw the old cotton prince.

"And a prince he looks like," quoth Tom to himself, as he waited in the bank outside, and looked through the glass screen. "How well the old man wears! I wonder how many fresh thousands he has made since I saw him last, seven years ago."

And a very noble person Lord Minchampstead did look; one to whom hats went off almost without their owners' will; tall and portly, with a soldier-like air of dignity and command, which was relieved by the good-nature of the countenance. Yet it was a good-nature which would stand no trifling. The jaw was deep and broad, though finely shaped; the mouth firm set; the nose slightly aquiline; the brow of great depth and height, though narrow;—altogether a Julius Caesar's type of head; that of a man born to rule self, and therefore to rule all he met.

Tom looked over his dress, not forgetting, like a true Englishman, to mark what sort of boots he wore. They were boots not quite fashionable, but carefully cleaned on trees; trousers strapped tightly over them, which had adopted the military stripe, but retained the slit at the ankle which was in vogue forty years ago; frock coat with a velvet collar, buttoned up, but not too far; high and tight blue cravat below an immense shirt collar; a certain care and richness of dress throughout, but soberly behind the fashion: while the hat was a very shabby and broken one, and the whip still more shabby and broken; all which indicated to Tom that his lordship let his tailor and his valet dress him; and though not unaware that it behoved him to set out his person as it deserved, was far too fine a gentleman to trouble himself about looking fine.