His waistcoat of a morning was pale buff--of an evening, embroidered velvet; wherewith were connected sundry schemes of an “association for the improvement of native manufactures.” His trousers, matutinally, were of the color vulgarly called “blotting-paper;” and he never wore boots,--which, he said, unfitted a man for exercise,--but short drab gaiters and square-toed shoes. His watch-chain was garnished with a vast number of seals; each seal, indeed, represented the device of some defunct company, and they might be said to resemble the scalps of the slain worn by the aboriginal Iroquois,--concerning whom, indeed, he had once entertained philanthropic designs, compounded of conversion to Christianity on the principles of the English Episcopal Church, and of an advantageous exchange of beaver-skins for Bibles, brandy, and gunpowder. That Uncle Jack should win my heart was no wonder; my mother’s he had always won, from her earliest recollection of his having persuaded her to let her great doll (a present from her godmother) be put up to a raffle for the benefit of the chimney-sweepers. “So like him,--so good!” she would often say pensively. “They paid sixpence apiece for the raffle,--twenty tickets,--and the doll cost L2. Nobody was taken in, and the doll, poor thing (it had such blue eyes!) went for a quarter of its value. But Jack said nobody could guess what good the ten shillings did to the chimney-sweepers.” Naturally enough, I say, my mother liked Uncle Jack; but my father liked him quite as well,--and that was a strong proof of my uncle’s powers of captivation. However, it is noticeable that when some retired scholar is once interested in an active man of the world, he is more inclined to admire him than others are. Sympathy with such a companion gratifies at once his curiosity and his indolence; he can travel with him, scheme with him, fight with him, go with him through all the adventures of which his own books speak so eloquently, and all the time never stir from his easy-chair. My father said “that it was like listening to Ulysses to hear Uncle Jack!” Uncle Jack, too, had been in Greece and Asia Minor, gone over the site of the siege of Troy, eaten figs at Marathon, shot hares in the Peloponnesus, and drunk three pints of brown stout at the top of the Great Pyramid.