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, Seedeyhuck 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,