“Vell, sare, you can pleasure yourself in dat matter; but it sall be moch ridicule if you pursue de puss in it.”
“But why not?” asked Billy, “hunting’s hunting, all the world over.”
“I cannot tell you vy, sir; but it is not etiquette, and I as a professor of garniture, toggery vot you call, sid lose caste with my comrades if I lived with a me lor vot honted poor puss in de pink.”
“Humph!” grunted Billy, bouncing out of bed, thinking what a bore it was paying a man for being his master. He then commenced the operations of the occasion, and with the aid of Monsieur was presently attired in the dread costume. He then clonk, clonk, clonked down stairs with his Jersey-patterned spurs, toes well out to clear the steps, most heartily wishing he was clonking up again on his return from the hunt.
[Original Size]
Monsieur was right. The Major is in his myrtle-green coat—a coat, not built after the fashion of the scanty swallow-tailed red in which he appears at page 65 of this agreeable work, but with the more liberal allowance of cloth peculiar to the period in which we live. A loosely hanging garment, and not a strait-waistcoat, in fact, a fashion very much in favour of bunglers, seeing that anybody can make a sack, while it takes a tailor to make a coat. The Major’s cost him about two pounds five, the cloth having been purchased at a clothier’s and made up at home, by a three shilling a day man and his meat. We laugh at the ladies for liking to be cheated by their milliners; but young gentlemen are quite as accommodating to their tailors. Let any man of forty look at his tailor’s bill when he was twenty, and see what a liberality of innocence it displays. And that not only in matters of taste and fashion, which are the legitimate loopholes of extortion, but in the sober articles of ordinary requirement. We saw a once-celebrated west-end tailor’s bill the other day, in which a plain black coat was made to figure in the following magniloquent item:—
“A superfine black cloth coat, lappels sewed on” (we wonder if they are usually pinned or glued) “lappels sewed on, cloth collar, cotton sleeve linings, velvet handfacings,” (most likely cotton too,) “embossed edges and fine wove buttons”—how much does the reader think? four guineas? four pound ten? five guineas? No, five pound eighteen and sixpence! An article that our own excellent tailor supplies for three pounds fifteen! In a tailor’s case that was recently tried, a party swore that fourteen guineas was a fair price for a Taglioni, when every body knows that they are to be had for less than four. But boys will be boys to the end of the chapter, so let us return to our sporting Major. He is not so happy in his nether garments as he is in his upper ones; indeed he has on the same boots and moleskins that Leech drew him in at Tantivy Castle, for these lower habiliments are not so easy of accomplishment in the country as coats, and though most people have tried them there, few wear them out, they are always so ugly and unbecoming. As, however, our Major doesn’t often compare his with town-made ones, he struts about in the comfortable belief that they are all right—very smart.