Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/49

 on board the "Victory," for Trafalgar, which closed the prospect of active service in the Navy. In 1806 he joined the "old 95th Rifles" as a second lieutenant. In the Spring of 1808 he was sent, at the age of twenty-five, as Governor to Sierra Leone, through the influence of Mr. Wilberforce, an early friend of his father's. During the eighteen months that Lieutenant Thompson was Governor of Sierra Leone he had fourteen fevers; and also had a narrow escape with his life from the claws of a panther that he kept as a pet—a sort of successor to a Greenland bear which he kept when a boy at Cattingham, his father's house between Hull and Beverley. As he related the incident to me, some one had given the panther the whole carcase of a kid with which the panther retired into the council-room which was unoccupied. The Governor went into the council-room and took the kid from the panther which did not make much resistance; but walked quietly two or three times round the room, and then suddenly sprung upon the Governor who had taken the carcase of the kid from it. After a struggle they came down together, and the Governor said he felt the claws of the panther upon his shins as if they were razors. Fortunately some persons came to his assistance,