330 ME. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR. 



notwithstanding the hounds were fed and the horses watered. Sir 

 Harry didn't " care a rap ; let them go as fast as they could." 



All these circumstances conspired to make them late ; added to 

 which, when Watchorn, the huntsman, cast up, which he did on a 

 higgler's horse, he found the only sound one in his stud had gone 

 to the neighbouring town to get some fiddlers, — her ladyship 

 having determined to compliment Mr. Bugles' visit by a quadrille 

 party. Bugles and she were old friends. When Mr. Sponge cast 

 up at half-past eleven, things were still behind-hand. 



Sir Harry and party had had a wet night of it, and were all more 

 or less drunk. They had kept up the excitement with a champagne 

 breakfast and various liqueurs, to say nothing of cigars. They 

 were a sad debauched-looking set, some of them scarcely out of 

 their teens, with pallid cheek, trembling hands, sunken eyes, and 

 all the symptoms of premature decay. Others — the sock-and- 

 buskin ones — were a made-up, wigged, and padded set. Bugles 

 was resplendent. He had on a dress scarlet coat, lined and faced with 

 yellow satin (one of the properties, we believe, of the Victoria), a 

 beautifully worked pink shirt-front, a pitch-plaster coloured 

 waistcoat, white ducks, and jack-boots, with brass heel spurs. He 

 carried his whip in the arm's-length-wayof a circus master follow- 

 ing a horse. Some dozen of these curiosities were staggering, and 

 swaggering, and smoking in front of Nonsuch House, to the 

 edification of a lot of gaping grooms and chawbacons, when Mr. 

 Sponge cantered becomingly up on the piebald. Lady Scattercash, 

 with several elegantly-dressed females, all with cigars in their 

 mouths, were conversing with them from the open drawing- 

 room windows above, while sundry good-looking damsels ogled 

 them from the attics above. Such was the tableau that presented 

 itself to Mr. Sponge as he cantered round the turn that brought 

 him in front of the Elizabethan mansion of Nonsuch House. 



Sir Harry, who was still rather drunk, thinking that every person 

 there must be either one of his party, or a friend of one of his party, 

 or a neighbour, or some one that he had seen before, reeled up to 

 our friend as he stopped, and, shaking him heartily by the hand, 

 asked him to come in and have something to eat. This was a 

 godsend to Mr. Sponge, who accepted the proffered hand most 

 readily, shaking it in a way that quite satisfied Sir Harry he was 

 right in some one or other of his conjectures. Bugles, and all the 

 reeling, swaggering bucks, looked respectfully at the well-appointed 

 man, and Bugles determined to have a pair of nut-brown tops as 

 soon as ever he got back to town. 



Sir Harry was a tall, wan, pale young man, with a strong 

 tendency to delirium tremens ; that, and consumption, appeared to 

 be running a match for his person. He was a harum-scarum 

 fellow, all strings, and tapes, and ends, and flue. He looked as if 



