288 The Leather Plater. 



rendered him so gloomy and taciturn j and Charley, the whip, who 

 was the wit of the kennel, declared " that he must have sold his 

 soul to the devil, or he never dare ride in the reckless manner which 

 he did ; or, if the pair of them were really mortal, they must be Dick 

 Turpin and old Black Bess come to life again." From the day he turned 

 the old mare up he became more testy and misanthropical, rarely 

 went off his own farm, was never seen at market, and, if a butcher 

 did want to buy any of his stock he must come to Shark's Lodge 

 himself for that purpose. Now, the old man's farm was not quite 

 so bad as Charley represented it. It was a decent, rough, grazing 

 farm, consisting of large pastures, divided from each other by deep, 

 broad ditches a capital one for breeding horses on and pasturing 

 young colts. It is true that the land in many places was in very 

 wretched condition, and the herbage coarse and rough ; still, in parts, 

 the bottom was good, and many prime beasts were really grazed at 

 Shark's Lodge. There was very little arable land, and as the graz- 

 ing land was principally fed down by rough colts and bullocks taken 

 in at tack, the old man farmed his land with very little trouble and 

 at very little expense. 



I had never exchanged a word, good, bad or indifferent, with the 

 old man, and had never seen either the old mare Plover, or the 

 " filly indoors," though I had heard both of them rapturously spoken 

 of. As for calling at the lodge, no one would ever dream of this, 

 except upon the most urgent business - } for, by all accounts, old 

 Radford was more likely to slam the door in your face than ask 

 you to walk in. He was, moreover, a particularly ugly old fellow, 

 with a cadaverous-looking, hatchet-shaped face, cold, bleak, grey 

 eyes, and large projecting front teeth like a rabbit ; and Charley 

 used to tell a good tale, that a sailor, who was on the tramp down 

 to Liverpool, happened one day to call at the lodge to ask for a bit 

 of bread. Old Radford spied him from the window, and, bustling 

 to the door, opened it, and bid the man be off, without even giving 

 him a chance of asking for what he wanted. The man went his 

 way out j in less than a quarter of an hour he returned. Old Jack 

 met him again on the threshold, and, holding the door half ajar, 



