“The Shires!” he rejoined, with a perplexed air; “that increases our difficulties very much indeed. I could have made you, now, a particular neat provincial boot; but with this pattern it’s exceedingly difficult to attain the correct appearance for flying countries. I’ll show you a pair here, sir, that the Honourable Crasher sent back this very morning, because they fell away the eighth-of-an-inch at the setting-on of the leg, and the Honourable’s girth is at least two-and-a-half less than yours. You wouldn’t like a pair of Napoleons, I presume? Very fashionable just now, sir. All the gentlemen wear them in the Vale of Aylesbury.”
I confess I rather expected an outburst at this suggestion: my friend sharing with me a strong prejudice against what have been termed “Butcher-boots;” but
“Prolonged endurance tames the bold,”
and Sawyer submitted with considerable patience to the foreman’s promise, that they would do all in their power to make him two pair of top-boots, only inferior to those of the Honourable Crasher, and send them down to him in a little over a fortnight; or, “not to disappoint him, say punctually that day three weeks.”
A thorough revisal of gloves, neckcloths, &c., is soon made; and after a hearty luncheon at the railway station, I put my friend into a first-class carriage attached to the fast train, and wished him “Good sport,” and “Good-bye,” with a feeling somewhat akin to envy, as I remained in smoky London, and he was whirled away into the soft fragrant country saturated with rain, and smiling itself to sleep in the calm grey light of a mild winter’s afternoon. He had but one fellow-passenger, of whom more anon.
I wonder whether the reflections of other men in a railway-carriage, bowling through the midland counties at the rate of forty miles an hour, on such a day as I have described, are like my own. I honestly confess that a very few ideas, if they are favourite ones, are sufficient to fill my brain. As I speed along the level embankments, which give one such a commanding view of the surrounding country, I cannot help imagining myself on the back of a good horse, sailing away from field to field after a pack of hounds. How well I can see my way!—how easy the fences look!—how readily I distinguish the place I should make him take off at, and the exact spot on which he would land, choosing unhesitatingly the soundest ridge, on which I should increase my pace so confidently down to that glassy brook, that looks as if you could hop over it from here, but which memory tells me is at least fifteen feet of water! How easy to get a start from that spinny, shaped liked a cocked-hat, of which the three corners have puzzled me so often, never hitting the one the hounds came out at, though I have tried them all in turn! How contemptible the size of this woodland, in which I have yet known a fox hang for hours together! What a run I have in imagination! and how well I see it! Alas! like everything else coloured through that deceitful medium, how different from the “cold reality”!
Nevertheless, much as I sympathise in his bride’s consternation, I cannot deny a fellow-feeling with that bridegroom of whom it is related that, on a wedding-trip of many hours by the side of his late-won treasure, during which he ceased not to scan the adjacent fences with a practical eye, he uttered never a word during the entire journey, save this one remarkable sentence, “There’s my place! Where would you have it?”
Some such ruminations as the above probably engrossed the whole of my friend’s intellects, till the courteous offer of Punch—containing, as usual, one of Leech’s inimitable hunting sketches—drew his attention to his fellow-traveller, under whose multiplicity of wrappers he had no difficulty in recognising the placid features of the gentleman he had that morning noticed in the boot-shop. It was, indeed, none other than the Honourable Crasher; by this time completely worn out, and who, to do him justice, was a gentlemanlike, well-featured fellow enough, if he had not always looked so dreadfully tired.
The reply to such a courtesy, where there were no ladies in the carriage, could only be, “Have you any objection to smoking?” And as nobody ever does object nowadays to that soothing practice, and the “forty-shilling penalty” is, I trust, simply a dead-letter and a fallacy, the Laranagas were produced, and a couple of them soon got very freely under way.
No introduction from a mutual friend is equal to that of a cigar. Any two votaries of the “pleasant vice,” at least during the time they are engaged in its practice, are sure to fraternise, and in five minutes Mr. Sawyer and the Honourable Crasher were hard at it, I need scarcely observe, on the subject of fox-hunting; the former resolving, as far as possible, to pick the brains of his new acquaintance (if he could find them) on that exhaustless topic; the latter positively warming into a languid enthusiasm on the only subject to which he could direct his whole attention for ten consecutive minutes.