MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR. 411 



sunken-eyed, woe-begone, iron-marked, desperately-abused brutes, 

 lacking all the lively energy tliat characterises the movements of the 

 up-to-the-niark hunter. In the early days of steeple-chasing a popu- 

 lar fiction existed that the horses were hunters ; and grooms and 

 fellows used to come nicking and grinning up to masters of hounds at 

 checks and critical times, requesting them to note that they were out, 

 in order to ask for certificates of the horses having been " regularly 

 hunted," — a species of regularity than which nothing could be more 

 irregular. That nuisance, thank goodness, is abated. A steeple- 

 chaser now generally stands on his own merits ; a change for which 

 sportsmen may be thankful. 



But to our story. 



The whole country was in a commotion about this " Aristocratic." 

 The unsophisticated looked upon it as a grand reunion of the aris- 

 tocracy ; and smart bonnets and cloaks, and jackets and parasols 

 were- ordered with the liberality incident to a distant view of 

 Christmas. As Yiney sipped his sherry- cobler of an evening, he 

 laughed at the idea of a son of a day-labourer like himself, raising such 

 a dust. Letters came pouring in to the clerk of the course from all 

 quarters; some asking about beds; some about breakfasts; some 

 about stakes ; some about stables ; some about this thing, some 

 about that. Every room in the Old Duke of Cumberland was 

 speedily bespoke. Post-horses rose in price, and Dobbin and Smiler, 

 and Jumper and Cappy, and Jessy and Tumbler were jobbed from 

 the neighbouring farmers, and converted for the occasion into posters. 

 Ab"last came the great and important day — clay big with the fate 

 of thousands of pounds ; for the betting-list vermin had been plying 

 their trade briskly throughout the kingdom, and all sorts of rumours 

 had been raised relative to the qualities and condition of the horses. 



» Who doesn't know the chilling feel of an English spring, or 

 rather of a day at the turn of the year before there is any spring ? 

 Our gala-day was a perfect specimen of the order — a white frost, 

 succeeded by a bright sun, with an east wind, warming one side of 

 the face and starving the other. It was neither a day for fishing, nor 

 hunting, nor coursing, nor anything but farming. The country, save 

 where there were a few lingering patches of turnips, was all one 

 dingy drab, with abundant scalds on the undrained fallows. The 

 grass was more like hemp than anything else. The very rushe> 

 yellow and sickly. 



Long before mid-day the whole country was in commotion. The 

 same sort of people commingled that one would expect to see if there 

 was a balloon to go up, and a man to go down, or be hung at the 

 same place. Fine ladies in all the colours of the rainbow; and 

 swarthy, beady-eyed dames, with their stalwart, big-calve. 1, basket- 

 carrying comrades ; genteel young people from behind the counter; 

 Dandy Candy merchants from" behind the hedge; rough-coated 



