CHAPTER III. 



MR. BINKIe's friends — MARMION, BY CAPULET. 



It is only needful to mention to your friend that yoa are 

 looking out for a horse, in order to bring a perfect hail of 

 animals — most of them more or less unsuitable — to your door. 

 Your friend has told his friend, who has passed the informa- 

 tion on to a third ; then, as a river overflowing its banks and 

 spreading in all directions over the low-lying country around, 

 so does the news spread, even to the uttermost corners of the 

 land. No sooner had Travers Algernon Binkie intimated that 

 he wanted an animal to carry his twelve stone of goosefiesh to 

 hounds, than farmers, tradesmen, and dealers, both professional 

 and amateur, flocked to The Chase, turning up at all 

 imaginable hours, for the purpose of pressing their wares^ 

 mostly of the ' lame, the halt (string) , and the blind ' order — 

 upon his attention. 



Farmer Wintercabbage had ridden over on a six-year old 

 which he had bred himself. It was clean on the legs, light in 

 the middle, badly ribbed up, and had never been over a fence 

 in its life, nor done any work — probably because it couldn't; 

 and the reason that he hadn't sold it before was that nobody 

 would buy it. This brute Travers declined. Mr. Karl Krack- 

 whipz, a sporting Pole, had sent his groom to show him a hunter 

 which he ' had no use for,' but as the groom had had a row 



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