slightest detail in his
dress that could warrant the supposition of narrow fortune: his coat
and his waistcoat, of one color and stuff, were faultless in make; the
massive watch-chain that festooned across his chest in the last mode;
his thick walking-boots the perfection of that compromise between
strength and elegance so popular in our day; even to his cane, whose
head was of massive gold, with his arms embossed,--all bespoke a
certain affluence and abundance, the more assured from the absence of
ostentation.

His hat was slightly, very slightly, set on one side,--a piece of
"tigerism" pardonable, perhaps, as it displayed the rich brown curls of
very silky hair, which he had disposed with consummate skill before
his glass ere he issued forth. His large, full blue eyes, his handsome
mouth, and a certain gentleness in his look generally, were what he
himself would have called the "odds in his favor;" and very hard it
would indeed have been at first sight to form an estimate in any way
unfavorable to him. Bean Beecher, as he was called once, had been deemed
the best-looking fellow about town, and when he entered the Life
Guards, almost twenty years before the time we now present him, had been
reckoned the handsomest man and best rider in the regiment. Brother of
Lord Lackington, but not by the same mother, he had inaugurated that new
school of dandyism which succeeded to the Brummell period, and sought
fame and notoriety by splendor and extravagance rather than by the
fastidious and personal elegance that characterized the former era. In
this way Lord Lackington and his brother were constantly contrasted; and
although each had their followers, it was generally admitted that they
were both regarded as admirable types of style and fashion. Boodle's
would have preferred the Peer, the Guards' Club and all Tattersall's
have voted for the Honorable Annesley Beecher.

Beecher started in life with all the advantages and disadvantages which
attach to the position of a younger son of a noble family. On the
one side he had good connections, a sure status in society, and easy
admission into club life; on the other, lay the counterbalancing fact of
the very slender fortune which usually falls to the lot of the younger
born. The sum, in his case, barely sufficed to carry him through his
minority, so that the day he came of age he had not a shilling in the
world. Most men open their career in life with some one ambition or
other in