Finding his neighbour would not listen to his story, Mr. Sawyer thought he might as well get what he could in the way of information, and began accordingly to propound a series of questions, only interrupted by the occasional apparition, at the window, of a broad chest and ruddy bearded face belonging to the guard, who, seeing the gentlemen still smoking, vanished again incontinently. The examination proceeded much as follows, the catechumen, though waking up at intervals, becoming more and more comatose.
Mr. Sawyer: “It is very stiff, isn’t it, that Pytchley country? Large fences that won’t bear liberties being taken with them?”
The Honourable Crasher: “Yeas, I should say, it wanted a hunter to get over it.”
Mr. S.: “Do you consider it as difficult to cross as the Quorn?”
The Hon. C.: “Yeas—no—that’s to say, I ride the same horses in both; I don’t know that there’s much difference.”
“Whom do your consider your best men now, in your field?”
“Oh! there are lots of fellows who can ride, if they get a start. It’s impossible to say; there’s a good deal in luck, and a good deal in horses.” [N.B. This is hardly a sincere speech of the Hon. C.’s. He does not think either luck or horseflesh constitutes a customer, and has not the slightest doubt in his own mind as to whom he considers about the best performer in that or any other country; only modesty forbids him to name the individual.]
Mr. S., a little dissatisfied: “I suppose the Leicestershire men are splendidly mounted?”
Hon. C.: “No; I should say not. I never remember seeing so few good horses. I shouldn’t know where to get a hunter if I wanted one!”
Mr. Sawyer thought of the roan, and ran his eye over his friend’s slim figure and horsemanhorseman-like shape. “He’d carry him like a bird,” thought the owner, “and I shouldn’t mind letting him have him for two hundred, or say, if I dropped into a good thing with him, two hundred and fifty;” but he only observed, “I suppose you are very well mounted yourself?”