328 KINGSCLERE 



Shorthouse, saw his opportunity of being quits with his 

 assailant, and seized it. Collecting the copies of the 

 1 Sporting Times ' which contained the possibly inflated 

 accounts of the orgies in question (' Argus ' called them 

 * orgies '), he obtained a private interview with Sir Thomas 

 Henry, and thenceforward the prison regulations with re- 

 gard to the Doctor were enforced with strict austerity. 



WHO WROTE THE LIBEL? 



The writer of the libel on Sir Joseph Hawley was the 

 late Mr. Alfred Geary, and amongst other effects produced 

 by the abominable article was this — it made him a 

 journalist. Although yet a young man, he had up to the 

 period of his appearing as * Caustic ' in the ' Sporting 

 Times ' had a somewhat chequered career. He was in the 

 Crimea during the war connected with the British Army in 

 some non-combatant capacity, and, as he used to say, ' was 

 the last to leave.' He afterwards filled the office of private 

 secretary to General Peel ; and when he wrote the libel he 

 held a responsible position with Messrs. Tod Heatly & Co., 

 for which well-known firm of wine merchants he had 

 ' travelled,' commercially, in India. Alfred Geary was a 

 singularly amiable character. His manners were really 

 ' childlike and bland.' There was not an atom of malice 

 or ill-nature in his composition. ' Dangerous weapons 

 pens, when they are loaded with ink,' says somebody in 

 Robertson's comedy ' Society.' The dramatist was not 

 giving expression to a novel idea. The same thing had 

 been said before — if not in the same words. In the fingers 

 of Alfred Geary pen and ink became a deadly weapon 

 indeed ! And yet, such a living contradiction was he, a 

 gentler being never breathed. He was sub-editor of the 

 ' Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. 1 Left in charge 

 of the paper during the editor's brief holiday, he fastened 

 two quarrels with contemporary journalists on his chief's 

 innocent head, one of which took two years to heal, while 

 the other was never healed at all. Aggrieved person 

 number one wrote at the end of two years saying, with 

 regrets and apologies galore, that he had just discovered 

 that the writer of so-and-so was not his former friend the 

 editor ; while aggrieved person number two, who had 

 never missed an opportunity of paying off his fancied 



