a generous mixture of sharps and flats, commingling with coatless, baggy-breeched vagabonds, the emissaries most likely of the Peeping Toms and Infallible Joes, if not the worthies themselves.

‘Dear, but it’s a noble sight!’ exclaimed Viney to Watchorn as they sat on their horses, below a rickety green-baize covered scaffold, labelled, ‘Grandstand; admission, Two-and-sixpence,’ raised against Scourgefield’s stackyard wall, eyeing the population pouring in from all parts. ‘Dear, but it’s a noble sight!’ said he, shading the sun from his eyes’ and endeavouring to identify the different vehicles in the distance. ‘Yonder’s the ’bus comin’ again,’ said he, looking towards the station, ‘loaded like a market-gardener’s turnip- waggon. That’ll pay,’ added he, with a knowing leer at the landlord of the Hen Angel, Newington Butts. ‘And who have we here, with the four horses and sky-blue flunkies? Jawleyford, as I live!’ added he, answering himself; adding, ‘The beggar had better pay me what he owes.’

How great Mr Viney was! Some people, who have never had anything to do with horses, think it incumbent upon them, when they have, to sport top-boots, and accordingly, for the first time in his life, Viney appears in a pair of remarkably hard, tight, country-made boots, above which are a pair of baggy, white cords, with the dirty finger-marks of the tailor still upon them. He sports a single-breasted green cutaway coat, with basket-buttons a black satin roll-collared waistcoat, and a new white silk hat, that shines in the bright sun like a fish-kettle. His blue-striped kerchief is secured by a butterfly brooch. Who ever saw an innkeeper that could resist a brooch?

He is riding a miserable rat of a badly-clipped, mouse-coloured pony, that looks like a velocipede under him.

His companion Mr Watchorn, is very great, and hardly condescends to know the country people who claim his acquaintance as a huntsman. He is a Hotel Keeper -- master of the Hen Angel, Newington Butts. Enoch Wriggle stands beside them, dressed in the imposing style of a cockney sportsman. He has been puffing ‘Sir Danapalus (the Bart.)’ in public, and taking all the odds he can get against him in private. Watchorn knows that it is easier to make a horse lose than win. The restless-looking, lynx-eyed caitiff, in the dirty green shawl, with his hands stuffed into the front pockets of the brown tarriar coat, is their jockey, the renowned Captain Hangallows; he answers to the name of Sam Slick in, Mr Spavin, the horse-dealer’s yard in Oxford Street, when not in the country on similar excursions, to the present. And now in the throng on the principal line are two conspicuous horses -- a piebald and a white -- carrying Mr Sponge and Lucy Glitters. Lucy appears as she did on the frosty-day hunt, glowing with health and beauty, and rather straining the seams of Lady Scattercash’s habit with the additional embonpoint she has acquired by early hours in the country. She has made Mr Sponge a white silk jacket to ride in, which he has on under his grey tarriar coat, and a cap of the same colour is in his hard hat. He has discarded the gosling-green cords for cream-coloured leathers, and, to please Lucy, has actually substituted a pair of rose-tinted tops for the ‘’hogany bouts.’ Altogether he is a great swell, and very like the bridegroom.

But hark -- what a crash! The leaders of Sir Harry Scattercash’s drag start at a blind fiddler’s dog stationed at the gate leading into the fields, a wheel catches the post, and in an instant the sham captains are scattered about the road: Bouncey on his head, Seedeybuck across the wheelers, Quod on his back, and Sir Harry astride the gate. Meanwhile, the old fiddler, regardless of the shouts of the men and the shrieks of the ladies, scrapes away with the appropriate tune of ‘The Devil among the Tailors!’ A rush to the horses’ heads arrests further mischief; the dislodged captains are at length righted, the nerves of the ladies composed, and Sir Harry once more essays to drive them up the hill to the stand. That feat being accomplished, then came the unloading, and consternation, and huddling of the tight-laced occupants at the idea of these female women coming amongst them, and the usual peeping and spying, and eyeing of the ‘creatures.’ ‘What impudence!’ ‘Well, I think!’ ‘’Pon my word!’ ‘What next!’ -- exclamations that were pretty well lost upon the fair objects of them amid the noise and flutter and confusion of the scene. But hark again! What’s up now?

‘Hooray!’ ‘hooray!’ ‘h--o--o--o--ray!’ ‘Three cheers for the Squire! H--o--o--o--ray!’ Old Puff as we live! The ‘amazin’ instance of a pop’lar man’ greeted by the Swillingford snobs. The old frostbitten dandy is