Such was the man who now swaggered, with a good deal of noisy assumption, into the bar. Removing his hat with easy familiarity to Miss Lushington, he nodded a patronising “Servant, sir,” to myself, and then producing what he was pleased to call “a weed” from a leathern case the size of a portmanteau, proceeded to smoke, and drink the port-wine negus that had been kept hot for him, with a great appearance of comfort and gratification. The man had an air of rude health and bodily vigour about him, that was especially provoking to a cripple like myself. Though short and fleshy, his figure was round-made and strong, whilst the clearness of his eye and the colour in his cheek denoted an unimpaired digestion, and a circulation, to which languor, blue devils, and dyspepsia were unknown. There are some people in whose constitutions brandy-and-water and cigars seem to assimilate with the vital functions, and turn to health and strength. “They go all at once,” says the valetudinarian, and this may be true enough; nevertheless, I have seen many of these enviable _bons-vivants_ go for a very long time.
Notwithstanding the freedom of his manners, his brilliant attire and sporting exterior, I did not much admire Mr. Naggett. These instincts, prejudices—call them what you will—of likes and dislikes are oftener right than we suppose; and when I came to learn the antecedents of the sporting butcher, as in such a gossiping place as Soakington I was not long in doing, I was even less prepossessed in his favour than at first.
Mr. Naggett had begun life as the only son of a respectable tenant-farmer in the neighbourhood of Soakington. As a boy at a forty-pound school, he had distinguished himself less in mathematics, classics, and the use of the globes, than in such games of skill or chance as enabled him to get the better of his companions, to the increasing of his own stores in marbles, pocket-money, and what not. He smoked a short pipe in the playground, ate lollypops during school-hours, and smuggled shrub into the dormitory. When the master had him up for any of these offences, he was notorious for arguing the point, and comported himself on all disputed questions of discipline, like that troublesome mutineer who is called in the army and navy “a lawyer.” Unlike this individual, however, he took his punishment without wincing, and this Spartan quality made amends in the opinion of his schoolfellows for a good many shady tricks and unenviable qualities. The lad could use his fists too, an accomplishment he had learnt from an old poaching labourer who worked on his father’s farm; and although he took care never to match himself with any boy whom he could not conquer pretty easily, his prowess in this line gained him immunity for a good many little peccadilloes and infringements of the schoolboy’s code of honour, which is exceedingly stringent as far as it goes.