“So-so,” was the reply. “I’m rather short just now; only ten. Good useful brutes some of them; but I shouldn’t say my lot was quite first-class, by any means!”
Again Mr. Sawyer found subject for rumination. Ten! Only ten! and not first-class ones neither, though it was probable that a man who had ten hunters in his stable would not find it worth while to keep a bad one; and then he thought of his own three, and the severe infliction it would be to have to ride Marathon over the fences, which, as he looked from the window, loomed larger and larger in the twilight, as they approached the grazing districts. No secret, it has been said, is so close as that between a horse and his rider; and Mr. Sawyer hardly liked to confess, even to himself, the very inferior brute he had got in the bay. Somehow all the difficulties into which he had put him seemed to rise in his mind’s eye, like an accumulation of photographs, as he sat back amongst the cushions, and, withdrawing his gaze from the outward world, fixed it on the lately-lit lamp above his head.
He remembered, not without a shudder, what a cropper the brute gave him at that stile in the potato-garden, which at least he might have scrambled over, if he had only risen six inches. He recalled the famous run he lost from the Forty-acres, because no persuasion would induce Marathon to face the bullfinch enclosing that meritorious fox-covert, and which a donkey could get through, if he would only look at it. He reflected how the animal perversely
“Struck all his timber, fathomed all his ditches;”
how he had never cleared a brook with him, or gone a run to his master’s satisfaction; and how even old Isaac allowed his favourite “wur a better nag in the stable nor he wur in the field;” and so musing, he shuddered to think of their joint endeavours to get out of a fifty-acre pasture, with an ox-fence all round it, and the gate locked!
To avoid such horrible visions, he would have plunged once more into conversation, but looking at his neighbour, observed he was now deep in “The Idylls of the King,”—an epic which served at least to keep the Honourable Crasher awake, thereby substantiating a theory I have heard broached by certain philosophers, and which I am not entirely prepared to dispute, viz. that there is something of poetry in every man who rides hard across a country.
Certainly not a Knight of the Table Round could have been more daring in the saddle than the Honourable Crasher, for all his dissipated looks and languid manners; nor could he have been so engrossed in the fate of “The Lily Maid of Astolat,” nor so lost in the description of the black barge floating dreamily down with its snowy burden (perhaps the most beautiful piece of word-painting in the language), had he not acknowledged in some corner of his much-neglected intellect that divinæ particula auræ, which may often be found, like a sweet wayside flower, blooming in the most unexpected and uncultivated localities.
Though Mr. Sawyer was himself innocent of all such weaknesses, he had the grace not to interrupt his fellow-traveller, and consequently not a word more was spoken till they exchanged a courteous “Good-evening,” as they glided into the Market Harborough station, and the new arrival wondered in his own mind how it was possible for any one man to require such a quantity of clothing as must be contained in the numerous portmanteaus which the guard’s van produced, and which were claimed by the Honourable Crasher as his own.
“He can’t have been a week in town,” thought our honest friend, “for he was hunting here only last Friday, and he’s taken more clothes with him than I’ve got for my whole kit in the world!”
He had, however, his own affairs to attend to—himself and his modest luggage to stow away in a damp fly, with a broken-winded horse; his dinner to order at the principal hotel, where he meant to reside—at least, till he found out if he liked his quarters. For so old a traveller, he committed in this matter a somewhat unaccountable mistake. Dazzled by the magnificence of his manners, and the sumptuous verbal bill of fare which the waiter stated to be available, he left the details of his meal to that functionary—an oversight which produced a somewhat untoward result, inasmuch as that, after a visit to his stables, a minute inspection of his horses, and a long consultation with Isaac, concerning which of them he should ride on the morrow, interspersed with many complaints and prognostications of evil from the latter, when he returned to his apartment very hungry and in want of comfort, he found the following banquet prepared for his delectation: A slice of soft cod, one raw mutton-chop relieved by an underdone ditto, two sorts of pickles, and some exceedingly strong cheese.