In port and even in features he bore a singular likeness to the
Prince Regent. He himself could not but be aware of this, having
heard it so often remarked upon by persons acquainted with his Royal
Highness as well as by others who had never set eyes on him. In
short, our excellent Major may have dallied in his time with the
darts of love; there is no evidence that he ever took a wound.
Within a year after his return he bought back the ancestral home of
the Hymens, a fine house dating from the reign of Queen Anne.
(His great-grandfather had built it on the site of a humbler abode,
on the eve of the South Sea collapse.) It stood at the foot of
Custom House Hill and looked down the length of Fore Street--a
perspective view of which the Major never wearied--no, not even on
hot afternoons when the population took its siesta within doors and,
in the words of Cai Tamblyn, "you might shot a cannon down the
streets of Troy, and no person would be shoot." This Cai (or Caius)
Tamblyn, an eccentric little man of uncertain age, with a black
servant Scipio, who wore a livery of green and scarlet and slept
under the stairs, made up the Major's male retinue. Between them
they carried his sedan chair; and because Cai (who walked in front)
measured but an inch above five feet, whereas Scipio stood six feet
three in his socks, the Major had a seat contrived with a sharp
backward slope, and two wooden buffers against which he thrust his
feet when going down-hill.
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