This kind Colonel had also to take leave of a score, at least, of adopted
children to whom he chose to stand in the light of a father. He was
forever whirling away in post-chaises to this school and that, to see
Jack Brown's boys, of the Cavalry; or Mrs. Smith's girls, of the Civil
Service; or poor Tom Hick's orphan, who had nobody to look after him now
that the cholera had carried off Tom and his wife, too. On board the ship
in which he returned from Calcutta were a dozen of little children, some
of whom he actually escorted to their friends before he visited his own,
though his heart was longing for his boy at Grey Friars. The children at
the schools seen, and largely rewarded out of his bounty (his loose white
trousers had great pockets, always heavy with gold and silver, which he
jingled when he was not pulling his moustaches, and to see the way in
which he tipped children made one almost long to be a boy again) and when
he had visited Miss Pinkerton's establishment, or Doctor Ramshorn's
adjoining academy at Chiswick, and seen little Tom Davis or little Fanny
Holmes, the honest fellow would come home and write off straightway a
long letter to Tom's or Fanny's parents, far away in the country, whose
hearts he made happy by his accounts of their children, as he had
delighted the children themselves by his affection and bounty.
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