Such was he to the very young men just passing the threshold of life; to the older hands--fellows versed in all its acts and ways--he showed no false colors; such, then, he was, the character which no disguise conceals,--“the leg;” one whose solvency may be counted on more safely than his honesty, and whose dealings, however based on roguery, are still guided by that amount of honor which is requisite for transactions amongst thieves. There was an impression, too,--we have no warranty for saying how far it was well founded,--that Grog was behind the scenes in transactions where many high and titled characters figured; that he was confederate in affairs of more than doubtful integrity; and that, if he liked, he could make revelations such as all the dark days at Tattersall's never equalled. “They 'll never push _me_ to the wall,” he would say, “take my word for it; they 'll not make Grog Davis turn Queen's evidence,” was the boastful exclamation of his after-dinner hours: and he was right. He could have told of strange doings with arsenic in the stable, and, stranger still, with hocussed negus in the back parlor; he had seen the certain favorite for the Oaks carted out stiff and cold on the morning that was to have witnessed her triumph; and he had opened the door for the ruined heir as he left his last thousand on the green baize of the hell table. He was so accustomed to all the vicissitudes of fortune--that is, he was so habituated to aid the goddess in the work of destiny--that nothing surprised him; and his red, carbuncled face and jaundiced eye never betrayed the slightest evidence of anything like emotion or astonishment How could Beecher have felt any other than veneration for one so gifted? He approached him as might some youthful artist the threshold of Michael Angelo; he felt, when with him, that he was in the presence of one whose maxims were silver and whose precepts were gold, and that to the man who could carry away those experiences the secrets of life were no longer mysteries. All the delight an old campaigner might have felt had the Great Duke vouchsafed to tell him of his achievements in the Peninsula--how he had planned the masterly defences of Torres Vedras, or conceived the bold advance upon Spain--would have been but a weak representation of the eager enjoyment Beecher experienced when Grog narrated some of his personal recollections: how he had squared Sir Toby at Manchester; the way he had won the York Handicap with a dead horse; and the still prouder day when, by altering the flags at Bolton, he gained twenty-two thousand pounds on the Great National Steeplechase. Nor was it without a certain vaingloriousness that Grog would speak of these, as, cigar in mouth and his hands deep in his breeches pockets, he grunted out, in broken sentences, the great triumphs of his life.