COLONEL CODSHEAD 309 



and compression he can manage to squeeze himself 

 into the clothes he wore then. It certainly says 

 much for the elasticity and the accommodating 

 nature of human raiment that the clothes which then 

 encased our hero, will now contain a carcass almost 

 half as big again. Pride feels no pain, they say, and 

 that is lucky, or our colonel would be in the height of 

 suffering at the present moment, for the once easy, 

 well-fitting coat is now as tight as the parchment on a 

 drumhead — indeed all his clothes are in a correspond- 

 ing state of uneasiness. 



The coat is one of the few instances we have met 

 with of a scarlet coat being absolutely shabby without 

 bearing any apparent marks of wear. A hunting coat 

 generally fails at the laps, which acquire a fine 

 buckram -like feel and plum -coloured hue, to the 

 enhancement of the rest of the garment. The 

 Colonel's coat has gone down altogether. It has no 

 more sign of wear — horse wear at least — than an 

 omnibus cad's, or an old Vauxhall waiter's. There is 

 something healthy, sporting, and pleasing in the sight 

 of a well-dyed, well-stained, dull-buttoned old coat. 

 We look at it with the sort of reverence that we 

 regard the tattered banners in a church chancel, or in 

 a baronial hall. We respect the old rag for what it 

 has done ; but a frowsy, dusty, faded, flannelly, bath- 

 bricky looking thing like the Colonel's, suggests a 

 finger and thumb to the nose more than anything 

 else ; yet it has seen service — drawing-room, dining- 

 room, ball-room service, but little — very little — out- 

 of-door work. 



The history of a hunting coat, from the matter-of- 

 course fall on the first launch, down to the ultimate 

 dismissal as "too bad even for a wet day," would 

 furnish a fine theme for the pen of the biographer of 

 the "fox," or any other gentleman short of a subject. 

 The Colonel's coat, we don't think, ever got the 

 initiatory fall ; it has been an upstanding one all its 



