Our friends the Gordons made Homestead Farm their permanent residence, though they kept open house in town.  Beyond the Gordons’ was the modest home of an Irish baronet, Sir Thomas O’Hara.  Sir Tom was a bachelor of sixty.  He had run through two fortunes (as became an Irish baronet) in the racing field and at Homburg, and as a young man he had lived ten years at Limmer’s tavern in London.  When not in training to ride his own steeple-chasers, he was putting up his hands against any man in England who would face him for a few friendly rounds.  He was not always victorious, either in the field, before the green cloth, or in the ring; but he was always a kind-hearted gentleman who would divide his last crown with friend or foe, and who could accept a beating with grace and unruffled spirit.

He could never ride below the welter weight, and after a few years he outgrew this weight and was forced to give up the least expensive of his diversions.  The green cloth now received more of his attention, and, as a matter of course, of his money.  Things went badly with him, and he began to see the end of his second fortune before he called a halt.  Bad times in Ireland seriously reduced his rents, and he was forced to dispose of his salable estates.  Then he came to this country in the hope of recouping himself, and to get away from the fast set that surrounded him.

“I can resist anything but temptation,” this warm-hearted Irishman would say; and that was the keynote of his character.

Though Sir Tom was only sixty years old, he looked seventy.  He was much broken in health by gout and the fast pace of his early manhood.  But his spirit was untouched by misfortune, disease, or hardship.  His courage was as good as when he served as a subaltern of the Guards in the trenches before Sebastopol, or presented his body as a mark for the sledge-hammer blows of Tom Sayers, just for diversion.  His constitution must have been superb, for even in his decrepitude he was good to look upon:  five feet ten, fine body, slightly given to rotundity, legs a little shrunken in the shanks, but giving unmistakable signs of what they had been ("not lost, but gone before,” as he would say of them), hands and feet aristocratic in form and well cared for, and a fine head set on broad shoulders.  His hair was thin, and he parted it with great exactness in the middle.  His eyes were brown, large, and of exceeding softness.  His nose was straight in spite of many a contusion, and his whole expression was that of a high-bred gentleman somewhat the worse for wear.  Sir Tom was perfectly groomed when he came forth from his chamber, which was usually about ten in the morning.