94 TALES AND TRAITS OF SPORTING LIFE. 



buildings — of a truth I was not at all in the best of 

 humours, for I was the only man fairly up, had been 

 carried magnificently ; and ergo there was that purchasing* 

 incubus still heavy on me, though in intent wonderfully 

 altered. 



*' My income was not large/' I reasoned ; ^Hhe season 

 was nearly over — a hundred guineas was a great deal of 

 money — and what would my mother say if she heard of 

 it ? But, then a hundred for such a horse ! psliaiv I 

 Quibbler as I was, what excuse could I make to myself 

 if I didn't have him ?" 



After a ten minutes' lull, during which some half- 

 dozen reappeared, including- the King Herod firm, very 

 strongly lithographed, the steed with plenty of skin-deep 

 evidence of his mishap, and his pilot with the loss of the 

 smile and the eye-glass, a head whip — somehow or other 

 head whips, as far as horsemanship goes, always are the 

 head of the establishment — set us going again. 



To follow the fortunes of this second heat in any great 

 detail would, I fear, verge upon the tedious ; sufficient be 

 it, then, to say, that with, if anything, an increasing- 

 pace, I still '* followed the hoimds;" beginning with a 

 terribly stiff rail out of the rick-yard ; that the whip 

 followed me as well as he could ; and that the rest nicked, 

 crept, crawled, and looked on until we arrived at one of 

 those plain-speaking, anti-humbugging contrivances, a 

 brook. A Irooh, be it understood : not one of those ditch- 

 water affairs we hear so much about after dinner, but a 

 real brook, or a river if you like, twent}" feet full in the 

 only practicable place, and deep enough to float a frigate. 

 Well, what with skilful manoeuvring and the fortune of 

 war, the militaire, who exhibited, I must say, a vast deal 

 more of Mac-Adamised mud than proper glory about his 



