If 22. SPONGE'S SPOUTING TOUR. 233- 



was up, she thought he had gone to have his hunt before break- 

 fast, just as the young gentlemen in the last place she lived in 

 used to go and have a bathe. 



Baggs, we may add, was a married man, and Juliana and he 

 had not had much conversation. 



The reader will now have the kindness to consider that Mr. 

 Puffington has undergone his swell huntsman, Dick Bragg, for 

 three whole years, during which time it was difficult to say whether 

 his winter's service or his summer's impudence was most oppressive. 

 Either way, Mr. Puffington had had enough both of him and the 

 honours of hound-keeping. Mr. Bragg was not a judicious 

 tyrant. He lorded it too much over Mr. Puffington ; was too 

 fond of showing himself off, and exposing his master's ignorance 

 before the servants, and field. A stranger would have thought 

 that Mr. Bragg, and not " Mr. Puff," as Bragg called him, kept 

 the hounds. Mr. Puffington took it pretty quietly at first, Bragg 

 inundating him with what they did at the Duke of Downeybird's, 

 Lord Reynard's, and the other great places in which he had lived, 

 till he almost made Puff believe that such treatment was a 

 necessary consequence of hound-keeping. Moreover, the cost was 

 heavy, and the promised subscriptions were almost wholly 

 imaginary ; even if they had been paid, they would not have 

 covered a quarter of the expense Mr. Bragg run him to ; and, 

 worst of all, there was an increasing instead of a diminishing 

 expenditure. Trust a servant for keeping things up to the 

 mark. 



All things, however, have an end, and Mr. Bragg began to get 

 to the end of Mr. Puff's patience. As Puff got older he got fonder 

 of his five-pound notes, and began to scrutinise bills and ask 

 questions ; to be, as Mr. Bragg said, "very little of the gentle- 

 man ; " Bragg, however, being quite one of your " make-hay- 

 while-the-sun-shines " sort, and knowing too well the style of 

 man to calculate on a lengthened duration of office, just put on 

 the steam of extravagance, and seemed inclined to try how much 

 he could spend for his master. His bills for draft hounds were 

 enormous ; he was continually chopping and changing his horses, 

 often almost without consulting his master ; he had a perfect 

 museum of saddles and bridles, in which every invention and 

 variety of bit was exhibited ; and he had paid as much as twenty 

 pounds to different "valets" and grooms for invaluable recipes 

 for cleaning leather breeches and gloves. Altogether, Bragg 

 overdid the thing ; and when Mr. Puffington, in the solitude of a 

 winter's day, took pen, ink, and paper, and drew out a " balance 

 sheet," he found that on the average of six brace of foxes to the 

 season, they had cost him about three hundred pounds a-head 

 killing. It was true that Bragg always returned five or six-and- 



