of moral emotion. For some reason best known to himself, he never carried an umbrella or a walking-stick. He wore driving gloves upon every possible occasion, suitable and unsuitable, and he affected in particular, in all weathers not intolerably warm, a remarkable type of Green Overcoat with which the reader is already sufficiently acquainted. The irreverent youth of his acquaintance had given it a number of nicknames, and had established a series in the lineage of this garment, for as each overcoat grew old it was regularly replaced by a new one of precisely the same cloth and dye, and lined with the same expensive fur.
He told not a soul—only his chief friend and (of course) his servants had divined it—but Mr. Brassington lent to that Green Overcoat such private worship as the benighted give their gods. It was a secret and strange foible. He gave to it in its recurrent and successive births power of fortune and misfortune. Without it, he would have dreaded bankruptcy or disease. In the hands of others, he thought it capable of carrying a curse.
The son to whom his affections were so deeply devoted bore the three names of
