criticizing horses—­nay, he wouldn’t care to be undergoing Gustavus James himself—­anything, rather than rambling about a strange country in a cold winter’s night, with nothing but the hooting of owls and the occasional bark of shepherds’ dogs to enliven his solitude.  The houses were few and far between.  The lights in the cottages had long been extinguished, and the occupiers of such of the farmhouses as would come to his knocks were gruff in their answers, and short in their directions.  At length, after riding, and riding, and riding, more with a view of keeping himself awake than in the expectation of finding his way, just as he was preparing to arouse the inmates of a cottage by the roadside, a sudden gleam of moonlight fell upon the building, revealing the half-Swiss, half-Gothic lodge of Puddingpote Bower.

CHAPTER LIII

PUDDINGPOTE BOWER

We must now back the train a little, and have a look at Jog and Co.

Mr. and Mrs. Jog had had another squabble after Mr. Sponge’s departure in the morning, Mr. Jog reproving Mrs. Jog for the interest she seemed to take in Mr. Sponge, as shown by her going to the door to see him amble away on the piebald hack.  Mrs. Jog justified herself on the score of Gustavus James, with whom she was quite sure Mr. Sponge was much struck, and to whom, she made no doubt, he would leave his ample fortune.  Jog, on the other hand, wheezed and puffed into his frill, and reasserted that Mr. Sponge was as likely to live as Gustavus James, and to marry and to have a bushel of children of his own; while Mrs. Jog rejoined that he was ’sure to break his neck’—­breaking their necks being, as she conceived, the inevitable end of fox-hunters.  Jog, who had not prosecuted the sport of hunting long enough to be able to gainsay her assertion, though he took especial care to defer the operation of breaking his own neck as long as he could, fell back upon the expense and inconvenience of keeping Mr. Sponge and his three horses, and his saucy servant, who had taught their domestics to turn up their noses at his diet table; above all, at his stick-jaw and undeniable small-beer.  So they went fighting and squabbling on, till at last the scene ended, as usual, by Mrs. Jogglebury bursting into tears, and declaring that Jog didn’t care a farthing either for her or her children.  Jog then bundled off, to try and fashion a most incorrigible-looking, knotty blackthorn into a head of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst.  He afterwards took a turn at a hazel that he thought would make a Joe Hume.  Having occupied himself with these till the children’s dinner-hour, he took a wandering, snatching sort of meal, and then put on his paletot, with a little hatchet in the pocket, and went off in search of the raw material in his own and the neighbouring hedges.