"We've a minute yet," said Jack, and looked round. On the left was a park paling; on the right a stout hedge, and beyond it a grass field. "If it weren't for the ditch she could take the hedge," he said. "Shall we try?"
"We had better"—I answered—"rather be floored in a ditch than dashed to pieces against a coach."
"Lay on, then—here goes!"
I applied the whip to the left ear of the mare; Jack pulled at the right cheek. She turned suddenly out of the road and made a dash at the hedge. Away she went, harness, shafts, and all, leaving the stanhope in the ditch, and sending Jack and me flying, like experimental fifty-sixes in the marshes at Woolwich, halfway across the meadow. The whole incident was so sudden that I could scarcely comprehend what had happened. I looked round, and, in a furrow at a little distance, I saw my friend Jack. We looked for some time at each other, afraid to enquire into the extent of the damage; but at last Jack said, "She's a capital jumper, isn't she? It was as good a flying leap as I ever saw. She's worth two hundred guineas for a heavy weight."
"A flying leap!"—I said; "it was a leap to be sure, but the flying, I think, was performed by ourselves."
"Are you hurt?" enquired Jack.
"Not that I know of," I replied; "you're all right?"
"Oh! as for me, I enjoy a quiet drive, like this, very much. I'm certain it gives a filip to the ideas, that you never receive in a family coach at seven miles an hour. I believe I owe the mare a great sum of money, not to mention all the fame I expect to make by my invention. But let us get on to the next inn, and send people after the stanhope and the mare. We shall get into a car, and go comfortably home."
We did not go to the Oaks on Friday. We were both too stiff: for though a gentleman may escape without breaking his bones, still an ejectment so vigorously executed as the one we had sustained, always leaves its mark. In the mean time Jack was busy. Piles of volumes lay round him, scraps of paper were on the table, marks were put in the pages. He might have stood for the portrait of an industrious author. And yet a more unliterary, not to say illiterate, man than he had been before the runaway, did not exist in the Albany. "Curriculo collegisse juvat"—are there any individuals to whom their curricle has been a college, and who have done without a university in the strength of a fast-trotting horse? Jack was one of these. He had never listened to Big Tom of Christchurch, nor punned his way to the bachelor's table of St John's, and yet he was about to assume his place among the illustrious of the land, and have his health proposed by a duke at the literary fund dinner, as "Jack Stuart, and the authors of England;" and perhaps he would deserve the honour as well as some of his predecessors; for who is more qualified to return thanks for the authors of England than a person whose works contain specimens of so many? Your plagiarist is the true representative.
Jack's room is rather dark, and the weather, on the day of the Oaks, was rather dingy. We had the shutters closed at half-past seven, and sat down to dinner; soused salmon, perigord pie, iced champagne, and mareschino. Some almonds and raisins, hard biscuit, and a bottle of cool claret, made their appearance when the cloth was removed, and Jack began—"I don't believe there was ever such a jumper as the grey mare since the siege of Troy, when the horse got over the wall."