CHAPTER VI. 



MARJIION VANQUISHES SIR TOMMY. 



The following Saturday morning found Mr. Binlde- Junior 

 content to lie in bed, reading of the immortal contest fought 

 between Mendoza and the Birmingham Buster, varied by 

 occasional dives into Beckford, not one word of which could 

 he understand. But having now got over the worst of his 

 stiffness, he began to think he would buy a quiet, a very 

 quiet horse, and go in regularly for hunting, (Nota Bene, 

 that when the Binkies of the world say they will go in 

 for hunting, they mean that they will go in for skirting, 

 slinking through gates, gaps, etc.), and to what authority 

 could he better turn than to Peter Beckford of imiierish- 

 able memory? But never heeding that Peter's pages were 

 as so much Greek to him, he plodded steadily on at the book 

 (taking it, however, in homceopathic doses) in hopes that 

 some of it would soak in. As we have said, he sandwiched 

 in a bit of Beckford between two large slices of some world- 

 famed prize-fight (the literature of the P. E. being a thing he 

 peculiarly affected) and in this way managed to worry through 

 the immortal tome. 



Meanwhile his two friends were jogging along to the meet 

 at Halton Gate, Sir Tommy on the redoubtable chestnut, 

 i^agged and half choked with some anserous arrangement of 



