46 mr. sponge's sporting tour. 



hounds to run as if they were tied to it, and can be trailed so as to 

 bring in all the dangerous places in the country with a certain air of 

 plausibility, enabling a man to look round and exclaim, as he crams 

 at a bullfinch or brook, " he's leading us over a most desperate coun- 

 try — never saw such fencing in all my life ! " Drag-hunting, however, 

 as we said before, is not popular with sportsmen, certainly not with 

 huntsmen, and though our friends with their wounded feelings de- 

 termined to have one, they had yet to smooth over old Tom to get 

 him to come into their views. That was now the difficulty. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



OLD TOM TOWLER. 



There are few more difficult persons to identify than a huntsman in 

 undress, and, of all queer ones, perhaps old Tom Towler was the 

 queerest. Tom in his person furnished an apt illustration of the 

 right appropriation of talent and the fitness of things, for he would 

 neither have made a groom, nor a coachman, nor a postillion, nor a 

 footman, nor a ploughman, nor a mechanic, nor anything we know of, 

 and yet he was first-rate as a huntsman. He was too weak for a 

 groom, too small for a coachman, too ugly for a postillion, too stunted 

 for a footman, too light for a ploughman, too useless-looking for 

 almost anything. 



Any one looking at him in "mufti" would exclaim, " what an 

 unfortunate object ! " and perhaps offer him a penny, while in his 

 hunting habiliments lords would hail him with, " Well, Tom, how are 

 you?" and baronets ask him' "how he was?" Commoners felt 

 honoured by his countenance, and yet, but for hunting, Tom would 

 have been wasted — a cypher — an inapplicable sort of man. Old 

 Tom, in his scarlet coat, black cap, and boots, and Tom in his undress 

 — say, shirt-sleeves, shorts, grey stockings and shoes, bore about the 

 same resemblance to each other that a three months dead jay nailed 

 to a keeper's lodge bears to the bright-plumaged bird when flying 

 about. On horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, 

 grim-visaged, hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his 

 horse were all one, while on foot he was the most shambling, scamb- 

 ling, crooked-going crab that ever was seen. He was a complete 

 mash of a man. He had been soalped by the branch of a tree, his 

 nose knocked into a thing like a button by the kick of a horse, his 

 teeth sent down his throat by a fall, his collar-bone fractured, his left 

 leg broken and his right arm ditto, to say nothing of damage to his 



