28 mr. sponge's sporting tour. 



CHAPTER IV. 



LAVERICK WELLS. 



We trust our opening chapters will have enabled our readers to em- 

 body such a Sponge in their mind's eye as will assist them in following 

 us through the course of his peregrinations. We do not profess to 

 have drawn such a portrait as will raise the same sort of Sponge in 

 the minds of all, but we trust we have given such a general outline 

 of style, and indication of character, as an ordinary knowledge of the 

 world will enable them to imagine a good, pushing, free-and-easy sort 

 of man, wishing to be a gentleman without knowing how. 



Far more difficult is the task of conveying to our readers such in- 

 formation as will enable them to form an idea of our hero's ways and 

 means. An accommodating world — especially the female portion of 

 it — generally attribute ruin to the racer, and fortune to the fox- 

 hunter ; but though Mr. Sponge's large losses on the turf, as detailed 

 by him to Mr. Buckram on the occasion of their deal or " job," would 

 bring him in the category of the unfortunates ; still that representa- 

 tion was nearly, if not altogether, fabulous. That Mr. Sponge might 

 have lost a trifle on the great races of the year, we don't mean to 

 deny, but that he lost such a sum as eighteen hundred on the Derby, 

 and seven on the Leger, we are in a condition to contradict, for the 

 best of all possible reasons, that he hadn't it to lose. At the same 

 time we do not mean to attribute falsehood to Mr. Sponge — quite the 

 contrary — it is no uncommon thing for merchants and traders, men 

 who "talk in thousands," to -declare that they lost twenty thousand 

 by this, or forty thousand by that, simply meaning that they didn't 

 make it, and if Mr. Sponge, by taking the longest of the long odds 

 against the most wretched of the outsiders, might have won the sums 

 he named, he surely had a right to say he lost them when he didn't 

 get them. 



It never does to be indigenously poor, if we may use such a term, 

 and when a man gets to the end of his tether, he must have some- 

 thing or somebody to blame rather than his own extravagance or im- 

 prudence, and if there is no "rascally lawyer" who has bolted with 

 his title-deeds, or fraudulent agent who has misappropriated his funds, 

 why then, railroads, or losses on the turf, or joint-stock banks that 

 have shut up at short notice, come in as the scapegoats. Very willing 

 hacks they are, too, railways especially, and so frequently ridden, 

 that it is no easy matter to discriminate between the real and the 

 fictitious loser. 



