On another occasion, while riding down the Gallowtree Gate, in Leicester, he struck the horse of a coal-heaver, who, in return, cut him sharply across the face. Smith jumped immediately from his horse, and the driver from his cart, the latter doffing his smock-frock, the former buttoning his coat and turning up his sleeves. The conflict was desperate; and from a fellow weighing fourteen stone, and standing six feet high, he was receiving severe punishment, when, by constables and a crowd of people, the combatants were separated. "You shall hear from me again!" said Smith to his gallant smutty antagonist. True to his word, the next morning the squire's groom was seen inquiring where the coal-heaver lived. On finding the man, whose face, like his master's, had received some heavy bruises, he said to him, "Mr. Smith has sent me to give you this sovereign, and to tell you you're the best man that ever stood before him." "God bless his honour!" replied the man, "and thank him a thousand times."
When Tom Smith was at Eton, fighting had not cropped to the surface of a schoolfellow and friend who in after life, known by the name of +Wellington+, greatly distinguished himself in this world by seeking and by gaining pitched battles. "I suppose, Smith," said the old silver-haired Duke to him, one day, in London, "you've done now with _fighting_?" "Oh, yes," replied Smith, then in his sixtieth year, "I've quite given that up; but----" suddenly correcting himself, he added, "I'll fight yet any man _of my age_."
At Chapmansford, when upwards of seventy, a rough country fellow, before a large field of sportsmen, threw a stone at one of the hounds of the old squire, who instantly struck him with his hunting whip. "You daren't do that if you were off your horse," said the man. The words were hardly out of the clodhopper's mouth when (in the seventh age of man) Smith stood before him, with a pair of fists clenched in his face, in so pugilistic an attitude that the fellow took to his heels, and, amidst the jeers of his comrades, ran away.
In 1794 Tom Smith quitted Eton to become a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, where, with great diligence and assiduity, he hunted regularly in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire,--became a fearless swimmer,--learnt to pull a sturdy oar on the Isis,--was a good shot and billiard-player,--and excelled as a batsman in the cricket-field on Cowley Marsh and Bullingdon. On leaving the University he became a member of the Marylebone Club and a regular attendant at Lord's during the summer; he was also a member of the Royal Yacht Club. Mr. Smith's love for science and shipbuilding induced him to build several sailing and steam yachts. He considered himself to be the practical originator of the wave line, and, by the advice of the Duke of Wellington, he submitted to the First Lord of the Admiralty some important hints for improving the construction of gunboats. In autumn, winter, and spring, he instinctively "went to the dogs," or, as in sporting phraseology it is termed, "took to hunting," so eagerly, that in 1800, when only twenty-four years old, he was signalized in song as a daring rider in that celebrated run from Billesden Coplow, in which but four gentlemen, with Jack Raven the Whip, were able to live with the hounds.
