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.
"I 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, disease, 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 decrepitude 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.
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