Boys and Girls from ThackeraySweetser, Kate Dickinson
General
Boys and Girls from Thackeray
Sweetser, Kate Dickinson
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1811-1863 -- Characters
He regaled the ladies of the regiment with dive's letters, and those of
Miss Honeyman, which contained an account of the boy. He even bored some
of his hearers with this prattle; and sporting young men would give or
take odds that the Colonel would mention Clive's name, once before five
minutes, three times in ten minutes, twenty-five times in the course of
dinner, and so on. But they who laughed at the Colonel laughed very
kindly; and everybody who knew him, loved him; everybody that is, who
loved modesty, generosity and honour.
As to Clive himself, by this time he was thoroughly enjoying his new life
in England. After remaining for a time at Doctor Timpany's school, where
he was first placed by his aunt, Miss Honeyman, he was speedily removed
to that classical institution in which Colonel Newcome had been a student
in earlier days. My acquaintance with young Clive was at this school,
Grey Friars, where our acquaintance was brief and casual. He had the
advantage of being six years my junior, and such a difference of age
between lads at a public school puts intimacy out of the question, even
though we knew each other at home, as our school phrase was, and our
families were somewhat acquainted. When Newcome's uncle, the Reverend
Charles Honeyman, brought Newcome to the Grey Friars School, he
recommended him to my superintendence and protection, and told me that
his young nephew's father, Colonel Thomas Newcome, C.B., was a most
gallant and distinguished officer in the Bengal establishment of the
honourable East India Company; and that his uncles, the Colonel's
half-brothers, were the eminent bankers, heads of the firm of Hobson
Brothers & Newcome, Hobson Newcome, Esquire, Brianstone Square, and
Marblehead, Sussex, and Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome, and Park Lane,
"whom to name," says Mr. Honeyman, with the fluent eloquence with which
he decorated the commonest circumstances of life, "is to designate two of
the merchant princes of the wealthiest city the world has ever known; and
one, if not two, of the leaders of that aristocracy which rallies round
the throne of the most elegant and refined of European sovereigns."
I promised Mr. Honeyman to do what I could for the boy; and he proceeded
to take leave of his little nephew in my presence in terms equally
eloquent, pulling out a long and very slender green purse, from which he
extracted the sum of two and sixpence, which he presented to the child,
who received the money with rather a queer twinkle in his blue eyes.
After that day's school I met my little protege in the neighbourhood of
the pastry cook's, regaling himself with raspberry tarts. "You must not
spend all the money, sir, which your uncle gave you," said I, "in tarts
and ginger-beer."
The urchin rubbed the raspberry jam off his mouth, and said, "It don't
matter, sir, for I've got lots more."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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