COLONEL CODSHEAD 293 



human raiment that the clothes which then encased our hero, 

 will now contain a carcase almost half as big again. Pride 

 feels no pain, they say, and that is lucky, or our colonel would 

 be in the height of suffering at the present moment, for the 

 once easy, well-fitting coat is now as tight as the parchment on 

 a drum-head — indeed, all his clothes are in a corresponding 

 state of uneasiness. 



The coat is one of the few instances we have met with of a 

 scarlet coat being absolutely shabby without bearing any 

 apparent marks of wear. A hunting coat generally fails at the 

 laps, which acquire a fine buckram-like feel and plum-coloured 

 hue, to the enhancement of the rest of the garment. The 

 Colonel's coat has gone down altogether. It has no more sign 

 of wear — horse wear at least — than an omnibus cad's, or an 

 old Vauxhall waiter's. There is something healthy, sporting, 

 and pleasing in the sight of a well-dyed, well-stained, dull- 

 buttoned old coat. We look at it with the sort of reverence 

 that we regard the tattered banners in a church chancel, or in 

 a baronial hall. We respect the old rag for what it has done ; 

 but a frowsy, dusty, faded, fiannelly, bath-bricky-looking thing 

 like the Colonel's, suggests a finger and thumb to the nose 

 more than anything else ; yet it has seen service — drawing- 

 room, dining-room, ball-room service, but little — very little- 

 out-of-door work. 



The history of a hunting coat, from the matter-of-course 

 fall on the first launch, down to the ultimate dismissal as "too 

 bad even for a wet day," would furnish a fine theme for the 

 pen of the biographer of the " fox," or any other gentleman 

 short of a subject. The Colonel's coat, we don't think, ever 

 got the initiatory fall ; it has been an upstanding one all its 

 life. Some men pass with the ladies for great sportsmen 

 because they never get falls ; the dear creatures never imagin- 

 ing for a moment that they never get them because they never 

 give their horses a chance of giving them them. So, again, 



