“Done!” calls out Mr. Warrington; and the enthusiastic Jack was obliged to cry “Done!” too.
“Take him, Colonel,” Harry whispers to his friend.
But the Colonel said he could not afford to lose, and therefore could not hope to win.
“I see you have won one of our bets already, Mr. Warrington,” my Lord March remarked. “I am taller than you by an inch or two, but you are broader round the shoulders.”
“Pooh, my dear Will! I bet you you weigh twice as much as he does!” cries Jack Morris.
“Done, Jack!” says my lord, laughing. “The bets are all ponies. Will you take him, Mr. Warrington?”
“No, my dear fellow—one's enough,” says Jack.
“Very good, my dear fellow,” says my lord; “and now we will settle the other wager.”
Having already arrayed himself in his best silk stockings, black satin-net breeches, and neatest pumps, Harry did not care to take off his shoes as his antagonist had done, whose heavy riding-boots and spurs were, to be sure, little calculated for leaping. They had before them a fine even green turf of some thirty yards in length, enough for a run and enough for a jump. A gravel walk ran around this green, beyond which was a wall and gate-sign—a field azure, bearing the Hanoverian White Horse rampant between two skittles proper, and for motto the name of the landlord and of the animal depicted.
My lord's friend laid a handkerchief on the ground as the mark whence the leapers were to take their jump, and Mr. Wolfe stood at the other end of the grass-plat to note the spot where each came down. “My lord went first,” writes Mr. Warrington, in a letter to Mrs. Mountain, at Castlewood, Virginia, still extant. “He was for having me take the lead; but, remembering the story about the Battel of Fontanoy which my dearest George used to tell, I says, 'Monseigneur le Comte, tirez le premier, s'il vous play.' So he took his run in his stocken feet, and for the honour of Old Virginia, I had the gratafacation of beating his lordship by more than two feet—viz., two feet nine inches—me jumping twenty-one feet three inches, by the drawer's measured tape, and his lordship only eighteen six. I had won from him about my weight before (which I knew the moment I set my eye upon him). So he and Mr. Jack paid me these two betts. And with my best duty to my mother—she will not be displeased with me, for I bett for the honor of the Old Dominion, and my opponent was a nobleman of the first quality, himself holding two Erldomes, and heir to a Duke. Betting is all the rage here, and the bloods and young fellows of fashion are betting away from morning till night.