He could spar better than Knuckles, the private (who would have been a corporal but for his drunkenness, and who had been in the prize-ring); and was the best batter and bowler, out and out, of the regimental club.

He rode his own horse, Greased Lightning, and won the Garrison cup at Quebec races.

There were other people besides Amelia who worshipped him.

Stubble and Spooney thought him a sort of Apollo; Dobbin took him to be an Admirable Crichton; and Mrs.Major O'Dowd acknowledged he was an elegant young fellow, and put her in mind of Fitzjurld Fogarty, Lord Castlefogarty's second son.
Well, Stubble and Spooney and the rest indulged in most romantic conjectures regarding this female correspondent of Osborne's--opining that it was a Duchess in London who was in love with him--or that it was a General's daughter, who was engaged to somebody else, and madly attached to him--or that it was a Member of Parliament's lady, who proposed four horses and an elopement--or that it was some other victim of a passion delightfully exciting, romantic, and disgraceful to all parties, on none of which conjectures would Osborne throw the least light, leaving his young admirers and friends to invent and arrange their whole history.
And the real state of the case would never have been known at all in the regiment but for Captain Dobbin's indiscretion.

The Captain was eating his breakfast one day in the mess-room, while Cackle, the assistant-surgeon, and the two above-named worthies were speculating upon Osborne's intrigue--Stubble holding out that the lady was a Duchess about Queen Charlotte's court, and Cackle vowing she was an opera-singer of the worst reputation.