OVER A DISTANCE OF GROUND. 183 



trial nags, whose jockeys had orders to ride them out and 

 measure them, so that, as the conjurers say, 'there was no 

 deception,' and * nothing up anybody's sleeve.' 



Admiral Rous did not eat his hat, but took it off to his 

 colleague, while reserving to himself the right of eating it if 

 Lecturer won the Cesarewitch, which he did easily by half a 

 length from Lothario, who beat Proserpine a neck for second 

 place ; thus the running at Newmarket conclusively proved 

 the accuracy of the trials which had taken place at Winchester 

 and Danebury, though it would be hard to find three more 

 dissimilar courses. 



Riding them out. 



Admiral Rous's hatter, whose name has unfortunately 

 escaped us, was no doubt an intelligent and enterprising 

 tradesman, and as such presumably prosperous in his business ; 

 but what a colossal fortune he would have acquired had the 

 Admiral only carried out one half of his threats of devouring 



astounding paradox, or making an apparently common-place remark, would send 

 a room full of people into roars of laughter, when the same thing said by any- 

 body else would not have provoked a smile. It mattered not to whom he was 

 talking the gravest statesman, the most matter-of-fact money-grubber, the 

 shyest girl ' out ' for the first time in her life, one and all, old or young, left him 

 with the unalterable conviction that G. P. was the most delightful companion 

 he or she had ever come across ; and this charm of manner never left him to the 

 day of his death, at 75 years of age. 



