It was a little past the noon of a lovely day in the last Autumn, that, as I rode towards the Doncaster race-course, to enjoy an hour of its rural revelries, before the serious business of the Leger commenced, I found myself hailed by a voice, and an arm of a red silk _robe de chambre_, from a drawing-room window of the "Salutation." Now, when we set out in prepense search of adventure, it don't require the song of the Syrens to induce us to luff up to a hail. Turning under the gateway, therefore, I dismounted, and taking my way upstairs, made the apartment for which I was bound, with but little difficulty. The chamber was, certainly, not the worst specimen I had ever seen of the unfortunate world whereof it formed an item. The appointments combined no ordinary degree of comfort and elegance, while a table, placed at one of the windows, was stocked after a manner that would have done honour to the corporation of Bristol. Among various _plats_, consisting of cold partridges, French patés, devil'd grouse, and varieties of choice fruit, arose the graceful forms of tapering flasks, eloquent of many a rare and precious vintage. The lord or all, arrayed in a robe of scarlet silk, lined with purple of a like material, lay, dishevelled, in Sybarite indulgence, upon a sofa adjoining this teeming board. "_Couchant_," I knew him not; but as he rose to receive me, there, in that silk attire, stood confessed the worthy, a fragment of whose biography I am now in the act of perpetuating—the veritable hero of these presents, even Tom the Devil himself. As my acquaintance with him at the time (and indeed in all subsequent experience) was of a very desultory character, this introduction of him to the reader must be of a similar nature. Ireland was the land of his birth; but the particulars of his parentage were less definitely ascertained. I was assured he had _an uncle_ (from an episode in his life that it is not convenient here to enter upon), and, indeed, he himself admitted that he was in the habit of frequent intercourse with a person distinguished by that appellation. However, for our present purpose, it is enough that he was an eccentric, endowed with little of the tedious coherence of the merely common-place. When we laugh at the samples of his compatriots, put before us by the playwright and the actor, we regard them as pleasant burlesques, cleverly, though unnaturally, got up. Reader! if haply thou hast had no personal experience of Erin as it is, permit me to offer thee this characteristic fragment.