This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.

Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
exemplary divine, of good family.

But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
of trouble.

Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.

To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
gentleman!"

It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,