Newcome Brothers

Besides his own boy, whom he worshipped, this kind Colonel had a score, at least, of adopted children, to whom he chose to stand in the light of a father. He was for ever whirling away in postchaises to this school and that, to see Jack¹ Brown’s boys, of the Cavalry²; or Mrs. Smith’s girls, of the Civil Service; or poor Tom Hicks’s orphan³, who had nobody to look after him now that the cholera⁴ had carried off Tom, and his wife too. On board the ship in which he returned from Calcutta were a dozen of little children, of both sexes, some of whom he actually escorted to their friends before he visited his own; and though his heart was longing⁵ for his boy at Grey Friars. The children at the schools seen, and largely rewarded out of his bounty⁶ (his loose white trousers had great pockets, always heavy with gold and silver, which he jingled⁷ when he was not pulling his mustachios — 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 Indian country, whose hearts he made happy by his accounts of their children, as he had delighted the children themselves by his affection and bounty. All the apple — and orange-women (especially such as had babies as well as lollipops⁸ at their stalls), all the street-sweepers on the road between Nerot’s and the Oriental, knew him, and were his pensioners⁹. His brothers in Threadneedle Street cast up their eyes at the cheques which he drew.

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