128 Mr. Benjamin Bobbin. 



one of Prince Rupert's most roaring cavaliers, a bosom 

 friend of wild George Goring, and a great favourite with 

 His Majesty. The Colonel, aristocrat as he was, was as 

 ignorant a dog as you'd meet on a day's march anywhere, 

 and as he had a playful habit of drinking hard all day — 

 glasses of this, and stoups of that (what a stoup was 

 we don't exactly know, but suppose it to have been a 

 sort of article answering to the soda-water tumbler of our 

 time) — besides consuming at dinner enough claret and 

 Burgundy to satisfy ten ordinary cavaliers, he was gener- 

 ally in a state of fuddle, and when he was in his cups the 

 spelling of his name would puzzle him very considerably. 

 So on a hot night at the club, when the jolly Colonel had 

 lost all his ready money, and his I O U's in consequence 

 began to circulate, he would sign his name simply George 

 Goosy, or Goosey, the ''y" and "e" of the last syllable 

 and the ''de" in front proving too many for him. His 

 friends who were honoured with his correspondence natu- 

 rally thinking that he was the best judge as to how to spell 

 his own name, followed suit, and so that's how it was done, 

 as the conjurers say. 



Now the richly-timbered and beautifully-undulating park, 

 as the glib-tongued auctioneers delighted to call it in their 

 advertisements, belonging to Oakley Hall, happened to 

 come right in the track of the new line of railway, and 

 accordingly one fine morning Colonel Algernon Goosey, 

 the then proprietor, received formal notice from the 

 worshipful board of directors that they were going to run 

 their line right through the bottom of it. The Colonel 

 was at first furious. He was particularly cock-a-hoop just 

 then as it happened, for had not his horse Gil Bias just 

 won the Two Thousand Guineas, upsetting all the favour- 



