“Your tea will have drawn in five minutes, sir, and your toast is down at the fire now,” says she, patting and smoothing the cushions of her own particular arm-chair in her own particular corner, that I may sit at ease despite my injuries. How kind, how thoughtful she is! And heavens! what a _torso_ the woman has! Though her dressmaker lives over the saddler’s, in the High Street, at Waterborough, that black satin fits as if it came direct from Paris. Even now, mixing a glass of brandy-and-water for a customer, the turn of her waist and the cling of her corset would drive an artist into ecstasies. I am no artist, yet I cannot but think of Alfred de Musset’s song about his Andalusian Marquesa, of which, as the language and the sentiments are both French, I need not write them down here.
Whilst the customer drinks and pays for his glass of brandy-and-water, it is high time that I should explain how I came to be domiciled in the bar of the Haycock Hotel and Posting-house, Soakington, with a contused shoulder, a broken collar-bone, and a black eye.
Since my earliest boyhood I have been enthusiastically fond of hunting. I am not a skilful horseman; I never was what is called a _fine_ rider, perhaps not a forward one, though I have tried hard to think so; nor am I one of those who _know about hunting_ (by the way, I have often wondered what it is they _do_ know), but in ardent affection for the pursuit I yield to none. My godfather, one of the old Holderness lot, and not the worst of those hard-riding East-Riding _undeniables_, used to say of me, “The lad has a loose seat, and heavy hands, and not an over-quick eye, but his heart is in it. That’s what gives me hopes of him—_his heart is in it_!” And my godfather was right; my heart _was_ in it. As a boy at school, I kept a few beagles, and ran with them on foot, imitating, as far as a biped can, the actions and motions of a horse. At Oxford, I was a regular attendant on the far-famed drag, and to this day can remember vividly the merits of a certain game little chestnut called Jumping Jemmy, whom I used to ride unmercifully at a pecuniary consideration which must have cost me less than a shilling a leap. J. J. could jump like a cat, and had carried too many of us ever to allow an undergraduate to throw him down. That I never took my degree is the less to be wondered at, when I remember my favourite course of literature, in which, unfortunately, the examiner never thought of gauging my proficiency. I could have taken a “double-first” in all poor Nimrod’s works, and could have repeated a page or two right on end from any part of the famous run in the “Quarterly,” knowing the exact places in which Lord Gardner said, “A fig for the Whissendine!” and Lord Brudenel heard a cracking of rails behind him, and could not identify the man in the ditch because “the pace was too good to inquire!”