veteran that I ever met could have put him up to any trick, or added any experience to his store.  He seemed to have a marvellous and intuitive experience of the ways of life, and of the tricks of men.  No shady society came amiss to him.  He gambled, in his way, as coolly, and with as careful a precision, as Barry Lyndon; he met the keen frequenters of the betting-ring on equal terms, and contrived, amid that vortex to keep his head above water.  He had a faultless taste in wine—­he knew a good cigar by an instinct.  It is hardly necessary to add that, with all these accomplishments, he held and expressed the meanest opinion of human nature in general.  Not even Sir ROBERT WALPOLE could have more cynically estimated the price at which men might be bought.  As for women, this precocious paragon despised them, and women, as is their wont, repaid him by admiration, and, here and there, by genuine affection.  I shudder to think how he might have developed in the course of years.  It happened, however, that a shipwreck—­a form of disaster against which cynicism and precocity afford no protection—­removed him from the world before he had come of age.  Now, to call this infant young, would have been a mockery.  To all outward appearance, indeed, he was a boy, but his mind was that of a selfish and used-up roue of sixty, without illusions, and without hope.

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Let me pass to a more pleasant subject, and one with which you, my dear boy, are more closely connected.  I refer to my old friend.  General VANGARD, the kindest and best-natured man that ever drew half-pay.  Seventy years have passed over his head, and turned his hair to silver, but his heart remains pure gold without alloy.  In vain do his whiskers and moustache attempt to give a touch of fierceness to his face.  The kindly eyes smile it away in a moment.  He stands six feet and an inch, his back his broad, his step springy; he carries his head erect on his massive shoulders with a leonine air of good-humoured defiance.  To hear him greet you, to feel his hand-shake, is to get a lesson in geniality.  I never knew a man who had so whole-hearted a contempt for insincerity and affectation.  It was only the other day that I saw little TOM TITTERTON, of the Diplomatic Service, introduced to him.  TOM is a devil of a fellow in Society.  He warbles little songs of his own composition at afternoon teas, he insinuates himself into the elderly affections of stony-hearted dowagers, he can lead a cotillon to perfection, and is universally acknowledged as an authority on gloves and handkerchiefs.  It was at a shooting-party that he and the General met.  The little fellow advanced simpering, and raised a limp and dangling hand to about the height of his eyes.  The General had extended his in his usual bluff and unceremonious manner.  Naturally enough the hands failed to meet.  A puzzled look came over the General’s face.  In a moment, however, he had grasped the situation,