that he had already behaved most handsomely to his nephew; and the result
of this discovery was that the duke withdrew the two hundred a year.
Legard, however, who looked on his uncle as an exhaustless mine, went on
breaking hearts and making debts--till one morning he woke in the Bench.
The admiral was hastily summoned to London. He arrived; paid off the
duns--a kindness which seriously embarrassed him--swore, scolded, and
cried; and finally insisted that Legard should give up that d-----d
coxcomb regiment, in which he was now captain, retire on half-pay, and
learn economy and a change of habits on the Continent.

The admiral, a rough but good-natured man on the whole, had two or three
little peculiarities. In the first place, he piqued himself on a sort of
John Bull independence; was a bit of a Radical (a strange anomaly in an
admiral)--which was owing, perhaps, to two or three young lords having
been put over his head in the earlier part of his career; and he made it
a point with his nephew (of whose affection he was jealous) to break with
those fine grand connections, who plunged him into a sea of extravagance,
and then never threw him a rope to save him from drowning.

In the second place, without being stingy, the admiral had a good deal of
economy in his disposition. He was not a man to allow his nephew to ruin
him. He had an extraordinarily old-fashioned horror of gambling,--a
polite habit of George's; and he declared positively that his nephew
must, while a bachelor, learn to live upon seven hundred a year.
Thirdly, the admiral could be a very stern, stubborn, passionate old
brute; and when he coolly told George, "Harkye, you young puppy, if you
get into debt again--if you exceed the very handsome allowance I make
you--I shall just cut you off with a shilling," George was fully aware
that his uncle was one who would rigidly keep his word.