ABSTRACT
On our return from our first voyage to the West Indies my mother and I took up our quarters temporarily at a boarding house in Weymouth Street, Portland Place, on the suggestion of my Uncle Ludlow who lived there. Left a widower some years before, and all his sons being in the Indian Army, his only daughter in Australia, he did not care to keep house, and boarding house life suited him. He was really as good as the master of the house, without any trouble or responsibility. The two Scots ladies who kept it—a widow, Mrs. Barton and her sister Miss McIvor—were both devoted to him, and stood in great awe of him. He had a very large room on the ground floor, took the head of the table at all meals, and being a capital carver (those were carving days) was a most valuable guest on that account only, but still more so for himself. He was as handsome and healthy looking an old man as you could ever see, very rosy-cheeked, clean shaven except as to his grey whiskers, comfortably stout, always clean and neat, the very pattern of an elderly English gentleman. His occupations, as I have said before, had been varied; he had numerous relatives in the Indian Army, others in the Navy, and he had brought a good deal of good and varied experience from many points of contact with his fellows who were guests at the dinner table. He was thoroughly upright, kind hearted and genial to boot. He liked company at meals, was indulgent to other people's weaknesses, and his presence at the breakfast and dinner table was undoubtedly a main attraction of the house. Into the drawing room on the first floor, on the other hand, he did not put his foot once in a twelvemonth, retiring after meals to his own room, in the evenings, to smoke over a single glass of spirit and water…
