310 MR. sponge's sporting tour. 



Sir Harry and party had had a wet night of it, and were all more 

 or less drunk. They kept up the excitement with a champagne break- 

 fast and various liqueurs, to say nothing of cigars. They were a sad 

 debauched-looking set, some of them scarcely out of their teens, with 

 pallid cheek, trembling hands, sunken eyes, and all the symptoms 

 of premature decay. Others — the sock-and-buskin ones — were - a 

 made-up, wigged, and padded set. Bugles was resplendent. He 

 had on a dress scarlet coat, lined and faced with yellow satin (one 

 of the properties, we believe, of the Victoria), a beautifully worked 

 pink shirt-front, a pitch-plaster coloured waistcoat, white ducks, and 

 jack-boots, with brass heel spurs. He carried his whip in the arni's- 

 length-way of a circus master following a horse. Some dozen of 

 these curiosities were staggering, and swaggering, and smoking in 

 front of Nonsuch House, to the edification of a lot of gaping grooms 

 and chawbacons, when Mr. Sponge cantered becomingly up on the 

 piebald. Lady Scattercash, with several elegantly-dressed females, 

 all with cigars in their mouths, were conversing with them from the 

 open drawing-room windows above, while sundry good-looking damsels 

 ogled them from the attics above. Such was the tableau that pre- 

 sented itself to Mr. Sponge as he cantered round the turn that 

 brought him in front of the Elizabethan mansion of Nonsuch House. 



Sir Harry, who was still rather drunk, thinking that every person 

 there must be either one of his party, or a friend of one of his party, 

 or a neighbour, or some one that he had seen before, reeled up to our 

 friend as he stopped, and shaking him heartily by the hand, asked him 

 to come in and have something to eat. This was a godsend to Mr. 

 Sponge, who accepted the proffered hand most readily, shaking it in a 

 way that quite satisfied Sir Harry he was right in some one or other 

 of his conjectures. Bugles, and all the reeling swaggering bucks, 

 looked respectfully at the well-appointed man, and Bugles determined 

 to have a pair of nut-brown tops as soon as ever he got back to town. 



Sir Harry was a tall, wan, pale young man, with a strong tendency 

 to delirium tremens ; that, and consumption, appeared to be running 

 a match for his person. He was a harum-scarum fellow, all strings 

 and tapes, and ends, and flue. He looked as if he slept in his clothes. 

 His hat was fastened on with a ribbon, or rather a ribbon passed 

 round near the band, in order to fasten it on, for it was seldom or ever 

 applied to the purpose, and the ends generally went flying out be- 

 hind like a Chinaman's tail. Then his flashy, many-coloured cravats, 

 stared and straggled in all directions, while his untied waiscoat-strings 

 protruded between the laps of his old short-waisted swallow- tailed 

 scarlet, mixing in glorious confusion with those of his breeches be- 

 hind. The knee-strings were generally also loose ; the web-straps of 

 his boots were seldom in; and, what with one set of strings and 

 another, he had acquired the name of Sixteen-string'd Jack. Mr. 

 Sponge having dismounted, and given his hack to the now half-drunken 



