“The pleasure we delight in physic's pain;”
his days pass lightly, and all his years are leap years!
He has lately inherited a considerable property, accumulated by a miserly uncle, and has most appropriately purchased an estate in one of the Ridings of Yorkshire!
With all his love for field-sports, however, he is no better “the better,” says he, “is often the worse; and I've no notion of losing my acres in gambling; besides, my chief aim being to be considered a good horseman, I should be a consummate fool, if, by my own folly, I lost my seat!”
A RIGMAROLE—PART III.
“Oderunt hilarem tristes.”
THE sad only hate a joke. Now, my friend Rory is in no sense a sad fellow, and he loves a joke exceedingly. His anecdotes of the turf are all racy; nor do those of the field less deserve the meed of praise! Lord F____ was a dandy sportsman, and the butt of the regulars. He was described by Rory as a “walkingstick”—slender, but very “knobby”—with a pair of mustaches and an eye-glass. Having lost the scent, he rode one day slick into a gardener's ground, when his prad rammed his hind-legs into a brace of hand-glasses, and his fore-legs into a tulip-bed. The horticulturist and the haughty aristocrat—how different were their feelings—the cucumber coolness of the 'nil admirari' of the one was ludicrously contrasted with the indignation of the astonished cultivator of the soil. “Have you seen the hounds this way?” demanded Lord F____, deliberately viewing him through his glass.
“Hounds!” bitterly repeated the gardener, clenching his fist. “Dogs, I mean,” continued Lord F____; “you know what a pack of hounds are—don't you?”