TOM TREHERNE'S TANDEM.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 16, 18 June 1874, Page 4

TOM TREHERNE'S TANDEM.

What reader of old chronicle has not smiled at the description of the Bishop of Bayeux at the Battle of Hastings, riding hither and thither amongst the combatants, encouraging and exhorting, and doubtless dealing some doughty blows with his priestly arm, when ‘ our side’ seemed to be getting the worst of it ? Yet was there nothing unnatural in this conduct of the reverend ecclesiastic. Do you think that Donna Amorosa, though she take vows and veil ever so enthusiastically, never looks back with longing to ‘ the days when she went gipsying,’ or sighs, as the moonbeams slant through her barred window, for serenade and masquerade, and the long warm summer nights, and the stolen meetings under the silent stars? Does Lawyer Mendax, man of property and position though he be, never regret the time when frankness ‘ came natural’ to him, and when purse and hand were at the service of the individual who happened for the time to be his fidus Achates 1 Many a furrowed-faced politican would give a year of his precarious pre-eminence to taste for a week the hearty partisanship of a public school ; and many a discreet divine feels his blood tingle as he thinks on the day when he steered that plucky screw in at the death, and won that fusty old fox-brush that lies on the top of the bookcase near the bust of Paley ; or as a twinge in his thumb (it was quite right after that sprain) recalls that memorable Fifth of November when his strong left - hander, straight from the shoulder and smart from the toes, sent the blatant boatman staggering back into the dark waters of the Isis ? We are men of peace now, of course ; but blame us not if, in the solitude of our chamber, we take down the old broadsword that was so hot to strike in the consulship of Plancus ; we shall do no harm by practising * cut 7 for the blade is rusty and notched as Falstaff’s weapon the morning after he took to the road. Such being the case, it was no wonder that the Rev Thomas Treherne never quite left off his old lunes, when he was deputed to his snug but small vicarage in W shire. ‘Tandem Tom,’ as he was called at the University, was one of those men in whom the ‘ horsey ’ element is ineradicable. Circumstances or duty might for a time throw it into the background, but there it was, tenacious and insuperable as the scrofula, or the heel of Achilles :. “ You may starch, you may straitlace a man if you will, But the scent of the stable will cling to him still.” Poor Tom I It was a sad day for him when he missed his class through being seduced into ‘ looking at’ a horse for a friend; which process involved taking him over a high jump and getting his arm broken. He was so gloomy the day the lists came out that, being seated behind the sweetest tandem team that ever stepped, he didn’t even offer to drive for the first three miles ; and he only brightened up when Charley Gridland handed him the reins of the pie-crust-colored pair, with the remark, ‘ There, Tom 1 they may refuse you the laurels, but, by Jove, you’re fully worthy of the bays 1* (To he continued )