OLD TOM TOWLER [Illustration] There are few more difficult persons to identify than a huntsman in undress, and of all queer ones perhaps old Tom Towler was the queerest.

Tom in his person furnished an apt illustration of the right appropriation of talent and the fitness of things, for he would neither have made a groom, nor a coachman, nor a postillion, nor a footman, nor a ploughman, nor a mechanic, nor anything we know of, and yet he was first-rate as a huntsman.
He was too weak for a groom too small for a coachman, too ugly for a postillion, too stunted for a footman, too light for a ploughman, too useless-looking for almost anything.
Any one looking at him in 'mufti' would exclaim, 'what an unfortunate object!' and perhaps offer him a penny, while in his hunting habiliments lords would hail him with, 'Well, Tom, how are you ?' and baronets ask him 'how he was ?' Commoners felt honoured by his countenance, and yet, but for hunting, Tom would have been wasted--a cypher--an inapplicable sort of man.
Old Tom, in his scarlet coat, black cap, and boots, and Tom in his undress--say, shirt-sleves, shorts, grey stockings and shoes, bore about the same resemblance to each other that a three months dead jay nailed to a keeper's lodge bears to the bright-plumaged bird when flying about.

On horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, grim-visaged, hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his horse were all one, while on foot he was the most shambling, scambling, crooked-going crab that ever was seen.

He was a complete mash of a man.

He had been scalped by the branch of a tree, his nose knocked into a thing like a button by the kick of a horse, his teeth sent down his throat by a fall, his collar-bone fractured, his left leg broken and his right arm ditto, to say nothing of damage to his ribs, fingers, and feet, and having had his face scarified like pork by repeated brushings through strong thorn fences.
But we will describe him as he appeared before Mr.Waffles, and the gentlemen of the Laverick Wells Hunt, on the night of Mr.Sponge's arrival.
Tom's spirit being roused at hearing the boastings of Mr.Leather, and thinking, perhaps, his master might have something to say, or thinking, perhaps, to partake of the eleemosynary drink generally going on in large houses of public entertainment, had taken up his quarters in the bar of the 'Imperial,' where he was attentively perusing the 'meets' in _Bell's Life_, reading how the Atherstone met at Gopsall, the Bedale at Hornby, the Cottesmore at Tilton Wood, and so on, with an industry worthy of a better cause; for Tom neither knew country, nor places, nor masters, nor hounds, nor huntsmen, nor anything, though he still felt an interest in reading where they were going to hunt.