“BOOTS AND SADDLES”
LONDON is in the way to everywhere. I have an old friend,—an honest
Lincolnshire squire,—who, paying his sister a visit in Norfolk, always
goes and returns by London. I do not think it is necessary to traverse
Oxford Street in order to proceed from the Old Country to Market
Harborough; and yet on the day that witnessed his faithful groom’s
introduction to Mr. Tiptop, John Standish Sawyer might have been, and
indeed _was_, seen crossing that crowded thoroughfare, with hasty steps
and air of considerable preoccupation.
The fact is, Mr. Sawyer was full of business. In the first place, it is
needless to observe, he had been to have his hair cut—a rite seldom
neglected by the true Englishman when entering upon a new phase in his
career. Also he had to purchase many articles of wearing apparel, such
as are only to be procured in the Metropolis. Since his rejection by
Miss Mexico (for previous to that casualty he had been rather a gaudy
dresser than otherwise), our friend, although preserving an equestrian
exterior, had suffered his wardrobe to run considerably to seed. In
truth, there was little temptation to extravagance on that score at The
Grange. But now that he was about to take his place, as he observed,
amongst the sporting aristocracy of Great Britain, it would be necessary
to call in the aid of such artists as consider themselves the especial
providers of boots, breeches, &c., for the first flight.
When I met him he was hurrying towards the well-known emporium of
Messrs. Putty & Co., now universally acknowledged to be the only firm in
London at which a truly workmanlike top-boot—combining, as their
advertisement expresses it, “comfort to the wearer, with satisfaction to
the looker-on”—is to be obtained. I could not resist my friend’s
imploring request to accompany him into the shop, and favour him with my
experience on a subject which cannot be mastered without considerable
observation and reflection.
Like most people from the country, Mr. Sawyer feels somewhat shy in the
presence of a fashionable London tradesman. When he entered the
warehouse, a languid gentleman, with one shoeless foot placed on a
square of brown paper, was drawling out his directions to Messrs.
Putty’s foreman, an exceedingly smart and voluble disciple of St.
Crispin.
“Not too thick,” said the languid man, in a tone of utter physical
exhaustion. “Man can’t ride nicely, if he don’t feel his stirrup through
his boot;” and Sawyer nudged my elbow with a delighted wink, that seemed
to say—“This swell, too, is a votary of Diana!”
The languid man’s silk-stockinged foot having been re-shod, he rose with
great difficulty, and moved feebly in the direction of his brougham,
from the window of which he adjured the shopman, in a faint voice, to
forward “the tops when finished to my address at Market Harborough,” and
sank back amongst the cushions, completely overcome.
The talismanic syllables raised the curiosity of my friend. “Who is it?”
he whispered eagerly to the returning shopman; and that worthy, placing
a chair and a fresh square of brown paper for his new customer, replied
somewhat condescendingly—“_That_, sir? That’s the Honourable Crasher,
sir; hunting gentleman, and _very_ particular about his tops. What can I
do for _you_, sir?”
I had now an opportunity of observing the great warmth and thickness of
the worsted stockings in which my friend kept his legs encased; also the
stout proportions of those useful limbs, more adapted perhaps for the
Highland kilt, than any other costume. Mr. Putty’s foreman saw at a
glance the difficulties he would have to contend with, and prepared to
subdue them.
“Very muscular gentleman!” said he; passing his tape round my friend’s
calf. “Great pedestrian powers, I should say. Inconvenient in the
saddle; but will endeavour to rectify that. Excuse me, sir: take the
liberty of asking whereabouts you generally hunt.”
“Hunt?” repeated the customer. “Oh! Leicestershire—Northamptonshire—all
about there—in the neighbourhood of Market Harborough.” Mr. Sawyer spoke
in a vague general sort of way, as if he was in the habit of pervading
the whole of the grazing districts.
A cloud gathered on the foreman’s brow.
“The Shires!” he rejoined, with a perplexed air; “that increases our
difficulties very much indeed. I could have made you, now, a particular
neat _provincial_ boot; but with this pattern it’s exceedingly difficult
to attain the correct appearance for flying countries. I’ll show you a
pair here, sir, that the Honourable Crasher sent back this very morning,
because they fell away the eighth-of-an-inch at the setting-on of the
leg, and the Honourable’s girth is at least two-and-a-half less than
yours. You wouldn’t like a pair of Napoleons, I presume? Very
fashionable just now, sir. All the gentlemen wear them in the Vale of
Aylesbury.”
I confess I rather expected an outburst at this suggestion: my friend
sharing with me a strong prejudice against what have been termed
“Butcher-boots;” but
“Prolonged endurance tames the bold,”
and Sawyer submitted with considerable patience to the foreman’s
promise, that they would do all in their power to make him two pair of
top-boots, only inferior to those of the Honourable Crasher, and send
them down to him in a little over a fortnight; or, “_not_ to disappoint
him, say _punctually_ that day three weeks.”
A thorough revisal of gloves, neckcloths, &c., is soon made; and after a
hearty luncheon at the railway station, I put my friend into a
first-class carriage attached to the fast train, and wished him “Good
sport,” and “Good-bye,” with a feeling somewhat akin to envy, as I
remained in smoky London, and he was whirled away into the soft fragrant
country saturated with rain, and smiling itself to sleep in the calm
grey light of a mild winter’s afternoon. He had but one
fellow-passenger, of whom more anon.
I wonder whether the reflections of other men in a railway-carriage,
bowling through the midland counties at the rate of forty miles an hour,
on such a day as I have described, are like my own. I honestly confess
that a very few ideas, if they are favourite ones, are sufficient to
fill my brain. As I speed along the level embankments, which give one
such a commanding view of the surrounding country, I cannot help
imagining myself on the back of a good horse, sailing away from field to
field after a pack of hounds. How well I can see my way!—how easy the
fences look!—how readily I distinguish the place I should make him take
off at, and the exact spot on which he would land, choosing
unhesitatingly the soundest ridge, on which I should increase my pace so
confidently down to that glassy brook, that looks as if you could hop
over it from here, but which memory tells me is at least fifteen feet of
water! How easy to get a start from that spinny, shaped liked a
cocked-hat, of which the three corners have puzzled me so often, never
hitting the one the hounds came out at, though I have tried them all in
turn! How contemptible the size of this woodland, in which I have yet
known a fox hang for hours together! What a run I have in imagination!
and how well I see it! Alas! like everything else coloured through that
deceitful medium, how different from the “cold reality”!
Nevertheless, much as I sympathise in his bride’s consternation, I
cannot deny a fellow-feeling with that bridegroom of whom it is related
that, on a wedding-trip of many hours by the side of his late-won
treasure, during which he ceased not to scan the adjacent fences with a
practical eye, he uttered never a word during the entire journey, save
this one remarkable sentence, “There’s my place! Where would _you_ have
it?”
Some such ruminations as the above probably engrossed the whole of my
friend’s intellects, till the courteous offer of _Punch_—containing, as
usual, one of Leech’s inimitable hunting sketches—drew his attention to
his fellow-traveller, under whose multiplicity of wrappers he had no
difficulty in recognising the placid features of the gentleman he had
that morning noticed in the boot-shop. It was, indeed, none other than
the Honourable Crasher; by this time completely worn out, and who, to do
him justice, was a gentlemanlike, well-featured fellow enough, if he had
not always looked so dreadfully tired.
The reply to such a courtesy, where there were no ladies in the
carriage, could only be, “Have you any objection to smoking?” And as
nobody ever _does_ object nowadays to that soothing practice, and the
“forty-shilling penalty” is, I trust, simply a dead-letter and a
fallacy, the Laranagas were produced, and a couple of them soon got very
freely under way.
No introduction from a mutual friend is equal to that of a cigar. Any
two votaries of the “pleasant vice,” at least during the time they are
engaged in its practice, are sure to fraternise, and in five minutes Mr.
Sawyer and the Honourable Crasher were hard at it, I need scarcely
observe, on the subject of fox-hunting; the former resolving, as far as
possible, to pick the brains of his new acquaintance (if he could find
them) on that exhaustless topic; the latter positively warming into a
languid enthusiasm on the only subject to which he could direct his
whole attention for ten consecutive minutes.
Racing men are bad enough. Politicians are sufficiently long-winded. A
couple of agriculturists will keep the ball rolling pretty perseveringly
on the congenial themes of “cake,” mangold wurzel, short-horns,
reaping-machines, and guano; but I have heard ladies, who are perhaps
the best judges of volubility, affirm that, for energy, duration, and
the faculty of saying the same thing over and over again, a dialogue
between a couple of fox-hunters beats every other kind of discussion
completely out of the field.
Mr. Sawyer took the initiative by pointing to the fox’s tusk which
fastened the string in his new friend’s hat.
“Done anything this last week?” said he, with that mysterious air
specially affected by all individuals who are connected, however
remotely, with horseflesh, and which, I believe, has much to answer for,
in the impression of consummate roguery which it conveys to the
uninitiated. “It’s been good scenting weather in my part of the world.
Hounds must have run hard on the grass.”
The Honourable Crasher emitted a large volume of smoke, ere he roused
himself for the effort, and replied: “Good thing, last Friday, with the
Pytchley, from Fox Hall. Do you know that country?” he added, thinking,
if his listener did _not_, he might save himself the trouble of
detailing it.
“I am on my way down to hunt there now,” rejoined our friend, “so I take
an interest, naturally, in your sport. Last Friday, you say? Ah! that
was the day we had such a fine run over _our_ country. Two hours and
forty-seven minutes, and killed our fox—_and killed our fox_,” he
repeated, as if such a climax was sufficiently rare to merit more than
common attention.
Nothing but the spirit of emulation between different packs could have
embarked the Honourable Crasher on a long story; but he woke up from his
lethargy at this juncture, and observed,
“Two hours and forty-seven minutes? Indeed! It must have been a fine
run; but slow, I conclude—slow. I never care much for anything over an
hour. It’s labour and sorrow, _walking_ after hounds, to _my_ mind.”
“Slow!” retorted Mr. Sawyer indignantly. “Not at all; I was riding the
best horse in my stable, and he had to do all he knew to live with them.
Fine country, too—wild fox-hunting country—not a soul in the fields;
very deep, and a good deal of fencing. I don’t know that I was ever
better carried,” he added meditatively, hoping to bring the conversation
round to the merits of the grey.
But the Honourable Crasher had his story to tell too, and broke in with
unusual vehemence:
“_Ours_ was about the quickest thing I ever rode to. Found in Faxton
Corner; fox never hung a second, and the hounds ran him over those large
grass-fields as if they were tied to him, all down by——Dear me, I forget
the names of the places, and I never _can_ describe a run; but if you
don’t know the country, it don’t signify. In short, they ran him all
about, you know, over a capital line, and turned him up in the open, at
the end of seven-and-twenty minutes, without a check, and very straight,
you know, and all that; satisfactory to everybody, and not at all bad
fun, and so on.” The Honourable C. was rapidly collapsing, running down
like the last notes of a musical box. Ere he arrived at this very
explicit conclusion, he had become perfectly torpid again.
Finding his neighbour would not listen to _his_ story, Mr. Sawyer
thought he might as well get what he could in the way of information,
and began accordingly to propound a series of questions, only
interrupted by the occasional apparition, at the window, of a broad
chest and ruddy bearded face belonging to the guard, who, seeing the
gentlemen still smoking, vanished again incontinently. The examination
proceeded much as follows, the catechumen, though waking up at
intervals, becoming more and more comatose.
Mr. Sawyer: “It is very stiff, isn’t it, that Pytchley country? Large
fences that won’t bear liberties being taken with them?”
The Honourable Crasher: “Yeas, I should say, it wanted a hunter to get
over it.”
Mr. S.: “Do you consider it as difficult to cross as the Quorn?”
The Hon. C.: “Yeas—no—that’s to say, I ride the same horses in both; I
don’t know that there’s much difference.”
“Whom do your consider your best men now, in your field?”
“Oh! there are lots of fellows who can ride, _if they get a start_. It’s
impossible to say; there’s a good deal in luck, and a good deal in
horses.” [N.B. This is hardly a sincere speech of the Hon. C.’s. He does
_not_ think either luck or horseflesh constitutes a _customer_, and has
not the slightest doubt in his own mind as to whom he considers about
the best performer in that or any other country; only modesty forbids
him to name the individual.]
Mr. S., a little dissatisfied: “I suppose the Leicestershire men are
splendidly mounted?”
Hon. C.: “No; I should say not. I never remember seeing so few good
horses. I shouldn’t know where to get a hunter if I wanted one!”
Mr. Sawyer thought of the roan, and ran his eye over his friend’s slim
figure and horsemanhorseman-like shape. “He’d carry him like a bird,”
thought the owner, “and I shouldn’t mind letting him have him for two
hundred, or say, if I dropped into a good thing with him, two hundred
and _fifty_;” but he only observed, “I suppose you are _very_ well
mounted yourself?”
“So-so,” was the reply. “I’m rather short just now; only ten. Good
useful brutes some of them; but I shouldn’t say _my_ lot was quite
first-class, by any means!”
Again Mr. Sawyer found subject for rumination. Ten! Only ten! and not
first-class ones neither, though it was probable that a man who had ten
hunters in his stable would not find it worth while to keep a bad one;
and then he thought of his own three, and the severe infliction it would
be to have to ride Marathon over the fences, which, as he looked from
the window, loomed larger and larger in the twilight, as they approached
the grazing districts. No secret, it has been said, is so close as that
between a horse and his rider; and Mr. Sawyer hardly liked to confess,
even to himself, the very inferior brute he had got in the bay. Somehow
all the difficulties into which he had put him seemed to rise in his
mind’s eye, like an accumulation of photographs, as he sat back amongst
the cushions, and, withdrawing his gaze from the outward world, fixed it
on the lately-lit lamp above his head.
He remembered, not without a shudder, what a cropper the brute gave him
at that stile in the potato-garden, which at least he might have
scrambled over, if he had only risen six inches. He recalled the famous
run he lost from the Forty-acres, because no persuasion would induce
Marathon to face the bullfinch enclosing that meritorious fox-covert,
and which a donkey could get through, if he would only look at it. He
reflected how the animal perversely
“Struck all his timber, fathomed all his ditches;”
how he had never cleared a brook with him, or gone a run to his master’s
satisfaction; and how even old Isaac allowed his favourite “wur a better
nag in the stable nor he wur in the field;” and so musing, he shuddered
to think of their joint endeavours to get out of a fifty-acre pasture,
with an ox-fence all round it, and the gate locked!
To avoid such horrible visions, he would have plunged once more into
conversation, but looking at his neighbour, observed he was now deep in
“The Idylls of the King,”—an epic which served at least to keep the
Honourable Crasher awake, thereby substantiating a theory I have heard
broached by certain philosophers, and which I am not entirely prepared
to dispute, viz. that there is something of poetry in every man who
rides hard across a country.
Certainly not a Knight of the Table Round could have been more daring in
the saddle than the Honourable Crasher, for all his dissipated looks and
languid manners; nor could he have been so engrossed in the fate of “The
Lily Maid of Astolat,” nor so lost in the description of the black barge
floating dreamily down with its snowy burden (perhaps the most beautiful
piece of word-painting in the language), had he not acknowledged in some
corner of his much-neglected intellect that _divinæ particula auræ_,
which may often be found, like a sweet wayside flower, blooming in the
most unexpected and uncultivated localities.
Though Mr. Sawyer was himself innocent of all such weaknesses, he had
the grace not to interrupt his fellow-traveller, and consequently not a
word more was spoken till they exchanged a courteous “Good-evening,” as
they glided into the Market Harborough station, and the new arrival
wondered in his own mind how it was possible for any one man to require
such a quantity of clothing as must be contained in the numerous
portmanteaus which the guard’s van produced, and which were claimed by
the Honourable Crasher as his own.
“He can’t have been a week in town,” thought our honest friend, “for he
was hunting here only last Friday, and he’s taken more clothes with him
than I’ve got for my whole kit in the world!”
He had, however, his own affairs to attend to—himself and his modest
luggage to stow away in a damp fly, with a broken-winded horse; his
dinner to order at the principal hotel, where he meant to reside—at
least, till he found out if he liked his quarters. For so old a
traveller, he committed in this matter a somewhat unaccountable mistake.
Dazzled by the magnificence of his manners, and the sumptuous verbal
bill of fare which the waiter stated to be available, he left the
details of his meal to that functionary—an oversight which produced a
somewhat untoward result, inasmuch as that, after a visit to his
stables, a minute inspection of his horses, and a long consultation with
Isaac, concerning which of them he should ride on the morrow,
interspersed with many complaints and prognostications of evil from the
latter, when he returned to his apartment very hungry and in want of
comfort, he found the following banquet prepared for his delectation: A
slice of soft cod, one raw mutton-chop relieved by an underdone ditto,
two sorts of pickles, and some exceedingly strong cheese.
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