OUR FRIENDS 205 
his diversions. The green cloth now received 
more of his attention, and, as a matter of course, 
of his money. Things went badly with him, and 
he began to see the end of his second fortune 
before he called a halt. Bad times in Ireland 
seriously reduced his rents, and he was forced to 
dispose of his salable estates. Then he came to 
this country in the hope of recouping himself, and 
to get away from the fast set that surrounded him. 
«TI 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, dis- 
ease, 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 decrepi- 
tude 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 
